How can women navigate the tech ‘broligarchy’?
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Al Jazeera Podcasts. Today, the future for women under the broligarchy. Billionaire, titan of industry, political mega-donor. Elon Musk has plenty of titles, but critics say he's earning a new one, broligarch. Ahead of International Women's Day, what can Silicon Valley tell us about what lies ahead for the United States? I'm Kevin Hurtin, and this is The Take.

I think if there's anything good that's coming from this current moment, it's that we're in a much more honest moment about like what these companies are doing, what their goals are. And it's certainly not to have a positive impact on like liberal ideals around the world as much as it is to like make money and kind of further the America first agenda. Yeah.

When you search the internet for Zoe Schiffer, you won't find her on X, Elon Musk's app formerly known as Twitter, very often. Though she literally wrote the book on it. Along with her book cover, you will see images of her with her baby on her shoulders and his fingers dangerously close to her eye.

My name is Zoe Schiffer. I'm the director of business and industry at Wired Magazine. I'm the author of Extremely Hardcore inside Elon Musk's Twitter. And I'm calling you from Santa Barbara, California. And you just had a baby.

Yeah, I had a baby six months ago, so I have a six-month-old and a three-year-old. It's peak craziness in my house right now. How has that changed your perspective on things, the work that you do? Oh, my gosh. Big question, big question. It kind of forces you to be optimistic about the future. And so I do feel like I'm going to be optimistic about the future.

feel that even in moments where what's going on currently can be intimidating and scary and seem kind of dire. I think that it kind of forces me to take the long view on what's happening and trust that there will be kind of like the pendulum will swing from one end to the other. So I wonder if maybe we can just define some terms here. What does the term broligarchy mean to you?

Yeah, I really think of this term as one that applies to Elon Musk and kind of the like extended Elon Musk universe. So the venture capitalists, the business leaders who not only have a big influence on like the economics of the tech industry in the world at large, but also, and I would say even more so have like an enormous cultural influence on those markets. Yeah.

So people who, you know, were very well known to you and I probably throughout this period, but suddenly have kind of launched into the mainstream in a really big way.

I think also it's important to say that, like, obviously this is not how these men conceptualize themselves. They very much, if you listen to them, see themselves as the good guy. They see themselves as fighting for the everyday American and actually grabbing back power from a liberal elite that had really overreached on what it was supposed to do, what it was in power.

So Saturday, March 8th is International Women's Day. And this year it comes as some of the richest and most powerful men in Silicon Valley cozy up to and even serve in the Trump administration. Of course, the richest and most prominent being Elon Musk. Your book, Extremely Hardcore, dissects challenges and confronts Elon Musk's Twitter takeover. So let's get started.

It looks like Elon Musk is now doing to the U.S. government what he did to Twitter. And as someone who saw that close up, just how worried should Americans be? I think it really depends on your perspective. I think there's cause for concern if you had faith in the institutions and the way that government functioned.

When we look at how the Twitter takeover happened, a lot broke along the way. And it wasn't dire because Twitter is Twitter. It's a social media platform. I think we're in a moment now where a lot is going or a lot could break and the consequences could be a lot more dire. They're implementing some of the very same strategies, things like zero-based budgeting, where you come in, you take a budget, you slash it down to zero and

And then you force the people under you to justify every single expense. What this looked like during the Twitter takeover was that employees were kind of locked in conference rooms over the weekend for eight to ten hours at a time arguing in front of Elon Musk why a critical piece of, like, security software should continue to be funded. And if he disagreed with them, he would fire them on the spot.

And what it looks like now is that they're taking the federal budget, even if some of the programs, you know, get funded down the road again or the budget is reinstated in certain areas, like, stuff will break along the way. Programs will, you know, have critical life-saving missions for people in the United States but also around the world. Right.

won't be able to do their work. And, you know, we're talking to people on the ground who are saying this is a matter of life and death in some cases. Right. It's a one is a private company that's supposed to make a profit. The other is a government which is supposed to provide services for people. There's just so different.

They're different. Yeah, I think that the value proposition that Elon Musk and his crew are taking here is that, like, well, the government should function more like a startup. I think their thesis is kind of like, if we root out the fraud and waste, we can kind of put America on a better track.

One of the things, one of the galvanizing issues for a lot of these people was the kind of looming debt crisis and the idea that the people who were running government were like going to bankrupt America. And that if you had business leaders who really understood economics, they could come in and kind of right the ship.

Now, I think that some of the things that they have talked about doing to right the ship, like cutting $2 trillion from the budget, could actually put America in a pretty dire position, according to economists that we have talked to at Wired. But that is kind of the thesis or the idea. Yeah.

Yeah. Austerity, but also a four point five trillion dollar tax cut for the richest Americans. That's of course not a real yes. And that's true. Yes. And I love it. OK, so are there any examples of of women's experience in particular during that period of Twitter that you think are worth highlighting?

Yeah, I mean, one obvious one that comes to mind and kind of still rattles around in my head as just an example of wild hypocrisy, if I may, was that Elon Musk, you know, shortly after he took over the company, slashed Elon.

The parental leave policy, which had previously been pretty generous, a series of months for both birthing and non-birthing parents, down to the minimum, wherever that employee lived, which can be like...

Very, very short, a matter of weeks after someone gives birth and a two-week top-off on top of that. It stood out to me because Elon Musk talks a lot about how low birth rate is a severe crisis that humanity is facing and he obviously encourages people to have kids.

And yet the policies at his company and certainly the work culture and the expectations of how and when people work make it, I would say personally, like a pretty hostile environment for parents. And oh, by the way, the person who owns that company is making boob jokes on Twitter. Like, yeah, that's a tough environment. And I think that there are a lot of people who I've talked to men and women who feel really disgusted with the status quo right now.

Yeah, well, tough environment is certainly...

The way to put it is all over the country. In many states, abortion is now very difficult to get and has been for a while. Women who advocate for women are struggling to get federal money because of Elon Musk's Doge initiatives. We've heard from a few women's organizations. Sahar Pazada works for Heart Women and Girls, which is a Muslim women's organization working in health, education and advocacy. The week that the executive

executive order had come around with regards to freezing federal funding for various agencies. The Office on Violence Against Women, which is located in the Department of Justice, was one of the federal agencies that was requiring a funding freeze. And my, you know, our executive director was in community with other EDs within the gender-based violence field, and they were

rightfully so, completely panicked. That, along with what you're describing about the Twitter takeover, it sounds like real hostility to, or at least indifference to women, which is doubly concerning now that Elon Musk has his hands on the levers of government, right? So you've been watching this closely. What concerns you as you reflect on these first few weeks of the Trump administration?

Oh, well, where to begin? I think that when Doge was first announced, I really tried to come at it from a perspective of optimism. Like the things that they were talking about doing were like eliminating fraud and waste, getting rid of some unnecessary bureaucracy. Like those seem like things that very few people could disagree with. Sure.

This kind of theme that I saw really clearly at Twitter continues to stand out to me, and it's this. When Elon Musk bought that company, he talked a lot about eliminating bots and spam and ridding the platform of child sexual abuse material. Again, things that everyone would agree absolutely need to happen. Who could argue with that? But we're two years out from that acquisition, and when we look at the platform now, I think a lot of people would say, no.

The platform is not succeeded on those fronts in fact the point that it has succeeded on was one that Elon Musk didn't state very clearly at all and it's turning Twitter from kind of a general social media platform a quote-unquote town square into a Political operation that's goal is to elevate Elon Musk's ideology in the United States and around the world Yeah similarly

Of course, yes, Doe should root out fraud and waste. I think everyone wants that. But I think two years from now, there's a possibility that we will look back and think, wow, maybe that wasn't the whole goal here. Maybe there was something much bigger going on. And that thing might not be one that serves everyday Americans. In fact, maybe it will serve people like Elon Musk and Donald Trump at the expense of everyday Americans.

Yeah, you're right. Thinking back to the Twitter files, remember, one of the reasons he bought Twitter and had to because there was this implicit bias towards the left. And he took that and turned it into an explicit bias for the right and his political beliefs. And so you're seeing similar echoes of that in what the purpose of Doge might actually be is to turn the federal government into something that elevates these sort of cultural right-wing points.

Yeah, I think, you know, it will be interesting to see how this plays out. You know, these goalposts can shift. And I think as journalists, it's our responsibility to kind of like keep an eye on like what is really going on here and what has changed from how they framed it originally.

So you are a pretty well-known figure now in Silicon Valley. You write for Wired and oversee their Silicon Valley coverage. You have a podcast and you wrote a book on Elon Musk. When you asked Musk for an interview, he responded with just a single emoji, which is the laugh cry emoji. So that's what we're dealing with.

Elon has loyal fans and he has a bot army on X. I wonder what it's just like for you when you brush up against this culture online.

Yeah, I'll say that it has changed over time. I feel like I get a lot less hate than I used to. At the kind of peak of the acquisition when I was writing a lot about Elon Musk and the Twitter takeover, I was pretty caught off guard, to be honest, by the amount of hate and vitriol and threats that I would get every single time I published an article. I think I'd kind of naively thought that being a woman had...

not only not hurt me in my career, but like maybe been an asset because as a tech reporter, it was like a little bit unique in some circles. But at the time I was writing every single article with my colleague and boss, Casey Newton, and it was really stark that we would publish something with both our names on it. Again, like a business story, not even something that I thought would be particularly controversial. And I would get kind of inundated with hate and Casey wouldn't.

And it was like, it was a pretty obvious contrast. So that was the first time in my life that I experienced something like that and kind of was forced to confront. But yeah, in some ways being a woman, I felt like made me vulnerable online in a way I hadn't totally realized. I also like during that moment was like,

getting a lot of stories because I was waking up in the middle of the night nursing and kind of Elon Musk would be sending out these emails at like 3 and 4 a.m. And I was getting a lot of skips because I was just like awake at those times. But at the same time, I was having this very like discombobulating feeling of kind of being in this sweet moment with my baby and then like seeing all these very nasty messages, sometimes like really horrific, um,

More with Zoe Schiffer after the break. This week on True Crime Reports, it's 2015 and we're in the tropical forests of the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

A man, a member of a local indigenous community, enters the forest with his son in search of medicinal herbs. They come across a group of eco-guards who've been placed here to protect the area from poachers. The guards open fire and the man's son is shot dead. So how far are Western groups willing to go in the name of conservation?

True Crime Reports, a new global crime show from Al Jazeera. Subscribe and listen wherever you get your podcasts.

So, Zoe, we've been talking about Elon Musk and Donald Trump, but there are many more players in this broligarchy that we're trying to talk about. A lot of these tech billionaires seem to be falling right in line behind Trump and Musk. And you've had kind of a front row seat watching these men, many of whom started their companies in their 20s, evolve from Obama era liberals into middle aged men, some of whom are sort of infatuated with Trump. What happened? How did we get here?

Yeah, I think it's such an interesting phenomenon. Like the flavor of masculinity that we're seeing at the top echelons of Silicon Valley is, it seems like a lot more, I guess, like old school masculinity than what we were used to. It's different and people are really embracing it.

I think that Mark Zuckerberg is a pretty like fascinating example here because one thing that a lot of these men talk about as like a turning point for them is they talk about cancel culture. The idea that in 2017, 2018, 2019, no matter how much good you supposedly had done for society, if someone dug up your old nasty tweets, you could be canceled and kind of cast out.

And I actually do think that this is an area where the left erred. I think when you don't give people a path to redemption,

and you make them feel shamed, that it's very radicalizing for them. And they will go to a community that they feel accepted in. And so Mark Zuckerberg, you know, had done a lot to apologize for Meta's missteps and mistakes. I think there's a lot of people who would say he hadn't done enough, but like he'd certainly tried to take ownership of

And beyond that, he had also invested heavily in kind of like what he says, politically neutral issues like paying for voting infrastructure and machines in different states and whatnot, and really investing in like a COVID response and vaccines. And what did he get from that from the left?

Well, Biden, you know, came out shortly after he'd made this big voting infrastructure investment and essentially said that Mark Zuckerberg had blood on his hands and like insinuated that he was killing people because Meadow was augmenting disinformation and misinformation about the pandemic around the country. And so...

I think that Mark Zuckerberg looked at that and said, like, well, I have one side that will basically not be pleased no matter what I do, seemingly. And I have another, the right, that is very transactional. If I leave you alone, you'll leave me alone. If I give you what you want, you might give me what I want. And so he's gone much more in that direction. And I think it could benefit Meta. It could behoove him to do that in certain ways, at least from a pure business perspective.

Yeah, no, it's interesting. I mean, we're talking about a backlash to this Me Too era, right? Where it was DEI, the woke mind virus. These guys are still like traumatized from that, it sounds like. But it was only five years ago, right? Things move really fast these days. Assuming that we don't go into this like full handmaid's tale kind of future. In five years time, there might be a backlash to this backlash and things look very different and especially for women. I

How could you imagine that process starting?

You know, I think particularly in Silicon Valley, like the job market is a really underappreciated factor here. When we have periods where there's a lot of competition for talent, people feel more comfortable speaking out, demanding that their companies take certain actions, that they implement certain policies. This is kind of the era that we were in in 2018 and 2019. This was like, you know, going into the pandemic, which was total boom times for startups and big tech companies alike.

And then the economy started to shift and there was a pullback. And now the perception is that it's very difficult to get a new job. And if you speak out, you will almost certainly lose your job. And so there's an unwillingness to demand more equality in a way that simply this wasn't the case a few years ago. So...

I think if that war for talent starts up again, if the economy stabilizes, I think that we will see people feel comfortable saying like, hey, this isn't okay or we need to make a change.

Yeah, I mean, what you're describing is there is a real disconnect between what the guys at the top want and what the workers want. In a lot of ways, yes. I think most people in the tech industry, or at least in Silicon Valley, they vote Democrat. They want, you know, liberal social policies.

And when we say liberal social policies, we mean like maternity leave in some cases. Yeah, ironically, those have- We're not asking for the moon here. As liberal, but yeah. Yeah, amazing. Okay, so we have this contrast, right?

Right? You have these massively powerful Silicon Valley men who are at the inauguration, right? Front row seats to power. Meanwhile, for women, the picture is much more mixed, right? There's Sheryl Sandberg from Meta and Lean In fame. There's Elizabeth Holmes, whose story obviously didn't end well. She's serving more than 11 years in prison for defrauding investors. The stories of women in Silicon Valley success at the top seems to be still few and far between.

What are your thoughts on that? You know, I do think there are a lot of women in high level positions all across Silicon Valley. But I will say, like, we're in a moment where the broligarchy, if you will, is becoming very mainstream, very prominent. And it's partly because they're out on Twitter. They're publishing podcasts online.

you know, every single week talking about a range of issues that go far beyond what they're doing every day for their actual jobs. We don't see as many women doing that. And I think part of the reason for that is that, you know, you're opening yourself up to a fair amount of criticism, hate, even threats when you do that. And so I think while the women are there, I might argue that they're, in fact, just like keeping their heads down and doing the work.

They're not trying to brand themselves as like thought leaders on a variety of topics. Right. So in this period, I think a lot of people, a lot of women especially, are angry. They're frightened. They don't know where this is going. How do you survive the broviligarchy? How do you become successful within it at the moment if things continue to head in the wrong direction for women's equality? What do women do then?

You know, I really hesitate to be prescriptive on like what women should and shouldn't do to succeed in this current moment. I think it's not women that need to change so much as like the systems around us need to change. We do need things like ample parental leave in order to support people to be able to have kids and return to work. We need...

some sort of subsidized child care so that when people are at work, there is a support system that will take care of their kids during those hours. Again, these are things that personally, ideally, I wish the state would take care of. So, you know, in the interim, I think companies do need to step up and fill the gap. And that's the way to make our industry and the world at large more equal. Zoe Schiffer, thank you for coming on The Take. Thank you for having me.

And that's the take. This episode was produced by Amy Walters with Sari El-Khalili, Marcos Bartolome, Hannah Shokir, Melanie Marich, Philip Llanos, Spencer Klein, and me, Kevin Hurtin. It was edited by Noor Wazwaz. Our sound designer is Alex Roldan. Our video editors are Hisham Abusalah and Mohanad El-Melham.

Alexandra Locke is the take's executive producer, and Ney Alvarez is Al Jazeera's head of audio. We'll be back tomorrow.