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FROM ONE TO ZERO There is a scenario in which Silicon Valley could literally go to zero in the next ten years. The successors would be China and the Internet: namely Chinese tech companies and Internet-based crypto protocols, because those have embedded political protection in a way Silicon Valley simply doesn’t. Here’s why this is possible. (1) The first and most obvious factor is that wealth seizures are now on the ballot in the most literal sense. The 2026 “Billionaire Act” referendum[1] directly targets the founders of billion dollar tech companies, which is to say that it directly targets the power law, which is to say that it targets the very economic logic of venture capital itself. No prospect of billionaires means no angel funding means no Silicon Valley. And if the first ballot doesn’t land, more referenda are likely to follow, till the ballots hit the target. (2) The second factor is that while some individuals have realized the threat, and have exited California for places like Texas and Miami (or Dubai and Singapore), many companies still have not. Unless the CEO makes it a priority to rebalance the entire team out of CA to another office, unless they viscerally realize that everything they’re building will be seized if they remain in California, they won’t prioritize it. The very smartest like Elon made this move years ago, but political normies won’t. (3) That brings me to my third point: the Bay Area tech scene is increasingly selected for political normies. They seem not to understand that companies incorporated in Delaware, listed in New York, and headquartered in California are embedded at three levels of the stack in enemy (which is to say blue) territory. They are still executing an obsolete 2000s-era playbook, which assumes the political platform under their feet will remain stable. (4) What’s the political platform? It’s a platform just like iOS or Android. In this case, it means the rules tech takes for granted in Washington, California, Delaware, and NYC that enable things like property rights, meritocratic hiring, visas, wire transfers, IPOs, and general rule of law. Those rules have been eroded over the last decade thanks to the Second American Civil War. A brief list includes: wealth seizures, DEI, remittance taxes, visa bans, abolition of police, tariffs, recission of stock awards (eg in Elon’s case), and punitive anti-tech regulation (especially for AI and crypto under Biden). (5) Unfortunately, this erosion of propitious conditions for tech now comes from both left and right. For much of the left, tech is white/male/capitalist. For much of the right, it is nonwhite/immigrant/globalist. Tech is now a class enemy for the US left and (to a lesser but real extent) a racial enemy for the right. This is a bad place to be. (6) This brings me to my next factor: the rise of extreme anti-tech sentiment. Especially for the Democrats, their rage at the Internet for taking away their control over media, money, and speech knows no bounds. Outside X, they hiss and spit daily over AI and crypto. And they are already burning self-driving cars, lighting up Tesla dealerships, and shooting CEOs. It is only a matter of time before more Luigi leftists and Kirk killer types engage in stochastic anti-tech terrorism. Needless to say, this is not something Silicon Valley has budgeted for. (7) The good news is tech has already largely decentralized. Hardware is in China. Elon is in Texas. Crypto is global. 400+ cities have unicorns. And once we have open AI models that can do what Claude Code does, it’ll be feasible to replicate much of what SV once did. So, progress will continue. (8) You can already see inklings of this future. Apple couldn’t ship a car, but Xiaomi could, and yet it’s <1/10 the valuation. Similarly, top crypto projects are roughly where tech was in 2010: near $100B, not yet the main event. So: the anti-tech meteor may not yet have hit the Silicon Valley dinosaurs. But we can see the mammals. POSTSCRIPT (a) Please note: the intended purpose of the California wealth seizure referendum is to rob or exile everyone in tech. There is no point in complaining about this as being stupid. (b) Rather than stupid, it is intentionally evil. The reason is that Democrats fear that technologists might actually displace their control over California, and so they are striking first. The goal of the Democrats is to drive tech out of California, like they did the Republicans, so they can enjoy permanent one-party control. California is after all not a democracy, because “elections” are held but the party always wins: (c) Democrats would prefer a Cuba-like California — where it’s dirt poor but they have total control — to a California where they might have to share power, because only with total one-party control can they pull off scams like the $100B train to nowhere. These "programs" aren't about building trains, but are about paying Democrat clients (in this case, unions): (d) Note also that blues don’t care about leftist billionaires and nepotists like Soros or Steyer. Only new money billionaires threaten them, as they have insufficient loyalty to the Democrat Party. (e) Anyway, for the most part, the Democrats are incorrectly paranoid. In reality, most tech guys are focused on their businesses, rather than taking over California. Only a small minority has any time for extracurricular political activity, and that too mostly at the national level. Because Silicon Valley tech is filled with nonvoting immigrants and just doesn’t have embedded within it any kind of explicit political theory. (f) Crypto, however, does. Bitcoin is the reason for the season. And it is a root and branch rejection of the Fed, expressed in a way that’s fully backwards compatible with American and Internet values. So web3 will eventually take over from web2 as web2 did from web1, simply because web3 is politically resilient (by being globally decentralized) while web2 naively trusts the stability of US institutions. (g) Among other things: cryptocurrency is built to resist wealth seizures, but Silicon Valley technology sure is not. Which is why this seizure referendum (or its successors) will likely kill Silicon Valley, and give rise to what it always should have been: the decentralized global Internet, fully resistant to the control of failed states. (h) Is there any hope for Silicon Valley? There is perhaps only one person there with the intelligence, resources, and strength of character to carve out a different future in the timeframe available, and that is Zuck. As a natural-born US citizen, he doesn’t have the same constraints that Thiel and Elon did. And he isn’t a wimp, politically. He has a latent potential similar to Elon’s prior to 2022. We will see if that potential is realized. (i) Anyway, read this article to get a sense of the seizures underway, and then extrapolate that out a few years to realize what’s in store for Silicon Valley: https://t.co/6iN2Z70C7B (j) Oh, and also read about Russia prior to the 1917 Communist Revolution. Did you know the Russians had a thriving stock market too, and their own technologist class (the cosmists), before their society was destroyed by the Bolsheviks? Check it out: https://t.co/eNZE7799xO (k) The big difference between the 21st century and the 20th is that we have the Internet. So the American attempts at neo-communist wealth seizure may not be as successful as the Soviet ones. Because the American entrepreneurs aren't rooted to the land in the same way the poor Russian kulaks were. They are instead based in the cloud. So, when the wokes come, they might swing at a ghost. That is, if Silicon Valley can exit in time.