In retrospect, we should’ve known something was up when neither Amazon’s Jeff Bezos nor Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg agreed to do what Big Tech titans always do: endorse the Democrat candidate for president.

We should’ve been clued in by Zuckerberg’s uncharacteristically admiring assessment of Donald Trump’s fist-pumping “Fight! Fight! Fight!” reaction to an assassin’s bullet taking off the top of his right ear in Butler, Pennsylvania, on July 13. Zuck called it “one of the most badass things I’ve ever seen in my life.”

And if that weren’t a hint and a half, then surely Bezos’s non-endorsement of either Joe Biden or Kamala Harris was doubly striking since he’s more than merely a Big Tech lefty. Bezos also owns The Washington Post, which has reflexively endorsed Democrats for nearly half a century. Think about it: If the Post can endorse Walter “Minnesota” Mondale over Ronald “The Other 49” Reagan in 1984, but Bezos can’t endorse the first Bay Area progressive woman of Jamaican-Indian descent over the loathsome Trump, then he either saw the writing on the wall, or he’s playing some kind of long game. Or both.

We noted this shift back in late July — a shift that’s only become more apparent since then. At the time, two technologists, Robert Bellafiore and Jon Askonas, wrote in City Journal: “A sea change is underway in the tech industry. It is increasingly not just permitted, but downright fashionable, for technologists to reside on the political right. Moments after the Trump assassination attempt, Elon Musk ‘fully endorse[d]’ the former president. In the following days, venture capitalist and PayPal alumnus David Sacks spoke at the Republican National Convention, leading venture capitalists Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz announced their support for Trump, and Trump tapped former venture capitalist J.D. Vance as his running mate. A new Trump super PAC enjoys the backing of Palantir’s Joe Lonsdale, the Winklevoss twins … and Musk himself.”

What a difference eight years makes. Bezos and Zuckerberg have both had dinner at Mar-a-Lago recently, as have Apple’s Tim Cook and Google’s Sundar Pichai and Sergey Brin. Recall that in the wake of Trump’s stunning 2016 win over Hillary Clinton, Brin addressed his fellow Googlers by noting, “As an immigrant and a refugee, I certainly find this election deeply offensive.”

Perhaps Brin has gotten over it. As for Bezos and Zuck, both have ponied up $1 million in pocket change to the Trump 47 Inauguration Fund. Why, it’s almost as if WaPo’s “Democracy Dies in Darkness” tagline was a cheap virtue signal and that years-long censorship of Trump on Facebook had never even happened.

Well, not exactly. Talk is cheap, and Trump had seen enough of Zuckerberg’s two-faced act to know that the little dork wasn’t to be trusted. This is why, on September 3, Trump published a coffee-table book, Save America, in which he fired a none-too-subtle shot across Zuck’s bow: “We are watching him closely,” Trump wrote, “and if he does anything illegal this time, he will spend the rest of his life in prison — as will others who cheat in the 2024 Presidential Election.”

Writing in The Spectator, Freddy Gray picks up on the rightward shift of the Big Tech titans:

Bezos is just one of a number of once-hostile gazillionaires who are now lining up to honor the Donald. Mark Zuckerberg — or “Zuckerbucks,” as Trump calls him — spent the years between 2016 and 2020 groveling to the political class for Facebook’s role in Trump’s election and the spread of right-wing populism across the world. In Trump’s newish coffee-table book, Saving America, he accuses Zuckerberg of being at the center of the plot to steal the 2020 election from him because of the $400 million Zuckerberg donated to funding [ahem] election integrity that year.

The question is: Will Trump play Big Tech, or will Big Tech play Trump? And if the marriage is short-lived, will Trump, in Gray’s words, “reveal all the shallowness, greed and stinking hypocrisy of the twenty-first-century elite for all the world to see?”

Or perhaps that isn’t the question at all. Perhaps the real question is whether this is more than a marriage of convenience. Is it possible that Big Tech is following Elon Musk’s lead and committing itself to a marketplace of ideas unencumbered by hard-left, speech-stifling zealots?

Time will tell. And we at The Patriot Post will be watching closely.