DON GONYEA, HOST:
OK. Have you heard the term the broligarchy (ph)?
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BRIDIE JABOUR: We're seeing a rise in what I guess we'll call the broligarchy.
BROOKE HARRINGTON: The broligarchs really have an explicit political agenda.
KEVIN HIRTEN: How do you survive the broligarchy?
GONYEA: That was Kevin Hirten on Al Jazeera's "The Take," sociologist Brooke Harrington on "The Daily Show" and Bridie Jabour of The Guardian Australia. The broligarchy is a term that refers to the rich, well-connected tech bros now flexing real power inside the Trump administration - CEOs like Meta's Mark Zuckerberg, Sundar Pichai of Google - both of which are among NPR's financial sponsors - and others like Jeff Bezos and, of course, Elon Musk. It's clear that these broligarchs have enormous influence not just in tech, but now in politics. What's less clear is their agenda, ideology and the path that brought them to this moment. Member Station KQED's internet culture podcast Close All Tabs recently released a two-part series about the broligarchy, and host Morgan Sung joins me now. Welcome.
MORGAN SUNG, BYLINE: Hi. Thanks for having me.
GONYEA: So Morgan, first, what sparked your interest in making this series?
SUNG: Well, so the broligarchy is this portmanteau of bro and oligarchy, which felt like the most accurate description of the people in power right now. And obviously, it's a tongue-in-cheek phrase, but it does point to something really serious. And like a lot of listeners, during inauguration, we watched Elon Musk onstage doing what appeared to be a Nazi salute, and we were like, well, how did we get here? And so the goal of Close All tabs is to provide context and help people understand that this moment that we're having isn't happening in a vacuum. And so we started to look into Elon Musk's roots, which inspired the episode on the PayPal Mafia.
GONYEA: What is - who is the PayPal Mafia?
SUNG: So that's the nickname for this group of tech bros. They were all co-founders, executives, engineers and other employees at PayPal in the early 2000s. You have Elon Musk, David Sacks, who's the White House crypto czar. You have Peter Thiel, another legendary investor. And after they left PayPal and became very rich because of the sale to eBay, they went on to found a ton of other companies within Silicon Valley, and they invested in each other's companies. They were sitting on each other's boards. They were advising each other. So the idea was, if you wanted to get your foot in the door in Silicon Valley, you had to get in with the PayPal Mafia. And so the name comes from this 2007 Fortune Magazine feature that literally calls them the PayPal Mafia in the headline, and they all posed for this absurd photo shoot.
GONYEA: And we have a clip from the podcast where you describe that photo shoot. Let's listen.
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SUNG: The cover photo features 13 of them, all men, of course, cosplaying as seedy New Jersey mobsters. They're dressed in track suits, leather jackets or big, boxy sports coats with the shoulder pads. They've got the chunky gold chains, of course, and their hair is slicked back, and they're surrounded by poker chips and glasses of whiskey. A few of them are puffing on cigars. It's a scene straight out of "The Sopranos."
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UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR: (As character) It's a stereotype, and it's offensive. There is no mafia.
SUNG: Today, this photo shoot might be considered an offensive caricature of Italian American gangsters, but it's 2007. It was a direct reference to the biggest show on TV at the time.
GONYEA: So once you started looking into all of the people in this photo that you described, what did you find out about them?
SUNG: Well, some of the core members of the PayPal Mafia, including Elon Musk, were born in South Africa during apartheid. They did grow up with immense privilege and wealth in an extremely authoritarian regime. And so we dug into those ties in the first part of our broligarchy series.
GONYEA: So let's dive a little more into the broligarchy, in particular Elon Musk. In your reporting, have you come across any ideas from Silicon Valley or elsewhere that really seem to shape how Musk thinks about governance?
SUNG: Yeah. So we were throwing around a couple of terms that we were seeing on social media. But we talked to a historian of technology and politics, Margaret O'Mara, and she explained why one that we thought was the most accurate - technofascism - didn't quite fit the situation. Technofascism specifically refers to this concept that relies on bureaucracy to function, with academics and technical experts in charge. And so DOGE is, you know, headed by Elon Musk, and they are slashing that very bureaucracy. And so Margaret introduced us to a concept that she thought would fit this kind of ideology a bit better, and that was techno-optimism.
GONYEA: Describe just what that means, techno-optimism.
SUNG: So it's the idea that technological innovation will save humanity and that nothing should ever stand in the way of tech progress, especially not the government, which seems to be embodied by Elon Musk and several other members of the broligarchy right now. And so a lot of these beliefs are laid out in something called the Techno-Optimist Manifesto. It's this lengthy blog post kind of essay written by venture capitalist Marc Andreessen. He was a co-founder of one of the early Internet browsers, Netscape. And after Netscape, he went on to found a pretty legendary venture capital firm and invested in a ton of companies. He's become a kind of kingmaker within Silicon Valley. That's what he's called.
GONYEA: And the thesis statement, if we can call it that, of your podcast, is to make sense of Internet and tech culture. Why is it so important to you to look at how the so-called broligarchy affects us in real life?
SUNG: Well, this goes beyond tech policy. Right now, the broligarchy has real political power. And so we wanted to look into where the roots of their beliefs came from and what those beliefs are and how they might be shaping our current government right now.
GONYEA: All right, Morgan, thank you so much for joining us.
SUNG: Thank you. Thanks for having me.
GONYEA: Morgan Sung is the host of Close All Tabs, a podcast from KQED Studios in San Francisco. You can listen to full episodes of Close All Tabs wherever you get your podcasts. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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