The Conversion of Silicon Valley

How did Donald Trump win over the technology industry? How did the country's most future-minded companies—managed and staffed by immigrants, and led by CEOs who had embraced corporate diversity policies—come to embrace a nationalistic, transactional view of power and a president whose scattershot trade war threatens their hugely profitable businesses? Put simply: What happened to Silicon Valley?

- MAX CHAFKIN

A tempting answer is Elon Musk. But three recent books suggest that Musk's right-wing turn is probably more symptom than cause, the latest manifestation of reactionary forces that have simmered, mostly unnoticed, within the tech industry.

Blessedly, Musk is not the main character in Unit X, a chronicle of efforts by the authors—Shah, an entrepreneur, and Kirchhoff, a tech adviser—to persuade Silicon Valley companies to make surveillance and weapons systems for the government. The book reveals how a left-leaning industry became enthusiastic about the military-industrial complex. When rank-and-file Google employees put up an early resistance to weapons work, Amazon and Microsoft saw an opportunity to double down on military contracts. Some tech leaders at companies like Palantir and Anduril were always on board.

Shah and Kirchhoff were hired to run the Pentagon's Defense Innovation Unit (Unit X for short) shortly after its creation under Barack Obama in 2015. Their goal was to make inexpensive consumer technologies, like tablets and productivity software, easily available to the military.

But, as