Opinion | In the Land of Billionaire Barbarians

A New York-based start-up founder I know recently visited Silicon Valley for the first time. He’d arranged to stay where the world’s richest people make the world’s most influential technology products. When he arrived, he was shocked to find a soul-crushing, car-choked suburban sprawl filled with office parks, auto dealerships and chain stores.

The part of Northern California we call Silicon Valley — a radius that includes the cities of San Jose, Mountain View, Cupertino, Menlo Park and Palo Alto — is home to four of the most powerful companies in the world. It has more combined wealth than most small countries, and at least 50 of its residents are billionaires. Yet by looking at it, you’d hardly know this place had any influence at all. Parts are pleasant, if provincial, with long avenues of low-slung ranch houses framed by eucalyptus trees. The rest is a placeless suburb, with aging infrastructure and cracks in the asphalt. Silicon Valley is one of the richest places on the planet, and it still has potholes in its streets. About a quarter of residents are struggling to survive there.

The tech elite have donated generously to scientific research and global health initiatives, but little of their money goes to improving their own backyard. The lack of investment in the cities where our tech lords work and live reveals a stark reality about how this wealth benefits a select few at the expense of everyone else. As the industry expands its footprint nationwide with data centers, the rest of America would be wise not to let the same thing happen again.

Throughout history, the world’s wealthiest and most powerful erected monuments that redefined their cities and communities. French monarchs built the Arc de Triomphe. Industrial tycoons funded the New York Public Library. The Medicis filled Florence with art.

Silicon Valley, on the other hand, has about as much cultural capital as an airport. Its greatest cultural institution might be the two-million-square-foot Westfield Valley Fair shopping mall, where people hang out on the weekends.

“If you were Napoleon Bonaparte, you built a building that was meant to last forever, as a monument to your fame and achievement,” said Fred Turner, a professor at Stanford University who studies media, technology and American cultural history. “Silicon Valley’s power is entirely different.”

This power is entirely inward-facing. Wealth is hidden within modest-looking homes and walled-off corporate campuses. If you can get inside, every privilege exists. But for those on the outside, the residue of wealth is virtually invisible.

This sleight of hand is not an accident. The richest people in the tech industry have blocked policies that would raise taxes, increase wages or otherwise reduce their wealth to make life better for the people who live around them.

Before the region became synonymous with the tech industry, it was an expanse of cherry orchards and plum trees known to locals as “the Valley of Heart’s Delight.” Then, in the 1950s, engineering talent began to arrive, lured in by Stanford and encouraged by military contracts from the Department of Defense. Soon, those fragrant orchards gave way to industrial office parks, and a cluster of companies producing silicon for computer chips and semiconductors gave the region its new nickname.

Those same companies also dumped chemicals used in manufacturing onto the surrounding land. These chemicals, which turned out to be highly toxic, seeped into the soil and groundwater and have been linked to severe birth defects. Santa Clara County, the southern part of Silicon Valley, has more Superfund sites — areas deemed by the Environmental Protection Agency as so contaminated they require years of cleanup — than anywhere else in the country. You could say that the tech industry has, from its inception, extracted value from the place where it exists while also actively poisoning it.

Today’s tech giants haven’t contaminated the region so much as colonized it. Over time, the Valley came to be organized, as Dr. Turner noted, like a series of feudal clusters: Google of Mountain View, Apple of Cupertino, Meta of Menlo Park, Nvidia of Santa Clara.

Each of these strongholds functions like a city in miniature, complete with cafes and dining halls, barber shops and dry cleaners, even health care clinics and day care centers. Apple’s campus — a glittering circle wrapped in the world’s largest panels of custom-made glass — includes a 100,000-square-foot wellness center with a two-story yoga studio. Meta’s 30 structures spread over 250 richly landscaped acres, which include a nine-acre rooftop park and its own main street with an arcade, barbershop and candy store. Much of this is free if you work there; the picture is less clear for the lower-wage custodians, cafeteria workers and security officers who often don’t work directly for the companies.

These luxurious domains leave most workers little reason to engage with the surrounding communities, and give the industry little reason to create anything for the public. Plenty of tech workers don’t even live in Silicon Valley; their companies provide employees free buses that shuttle them home north to San Francisco.

Isn’t this just capitalism? Companies aren’t charities. Yet plenty of companies outside Silicon Valley do invest in their surrounding communities, to the benefit of both their employees and everyone else. In Bentonville, Ark., Walmart’s founder and his family have spent considerable sums improving infrastructure, building museums, creating mountain biking trails and opening restaurants. In Midland, Mich., the Dow family (of Dow Chemical) financed extensive botanical gardens, miles of public parks and the Midland Center for the Arts. And in nearby San Francisco, Salesforce’s chief executive, Marc Benioff, helped fund the Presidio Tunnel Tops park, a beloved green space.

This type of philanthropy used to be much more common. The industrial tycoons of the Gilded Age bankrolled cultural institutions like the Met and Carnegie Hall as a way to soften their public image. The historian Margaret O’Mara referred to it as “reputation laundering.” By comparison, Dr. O’Mara told me, many of today’s tech tycoons are more capricious. Witness the way Mark Zuckerberg and his wife founded a free-tuition school through their foundation for low-income children in one of the poorest areas of Silicon Valley in 2016, only to abruptly close the school this year.

The cities of Silicon Valley do collect tax revenue from the companies that are headquartered there. Yet that revenue is wildly out of proportion with the actual volume of wealth in the region, which remains locked in untaxed gains. Some of the wealthiest people in Silicon Valley have become experts in avoiding certain tax liabilities.

In 2024 — when the regional economy hit $14.3 trillion in overall market capitalization — 70 percent of Silicon Valley residents said that their quality of life had grown worse over the past five years, according to a public opinion poll conducted by Joint Venture Silicon Valley. Today, there is some $1.17 trillion in liquid wealth among households in Silicon Valley, according to the latest Silicon Valley Index, an annual report on the economic status of the region. But researchers at San Jose State University, who publish the annual Silicon Valley Pain Index, found that 28 percent of local households “need outside assistance to survive in the region.”

Americans may not be aware of the struggles in Santa Clara County. But many have seen what our social media, internet search and e-commerce monoliths are doing to their families and their communities. Little wonder, then, that the tech industry’s push to build data centers across America — a sort of techno Manifest Destiny — is not being well received. Seven in 10 Americans oppose the idea of having a data center built in their community, according to a recent Gallup poll. That’s a level of resistance even greater than the opposition to building nuclear power plants.

“To some extent, these data centers are seen as a harbinger of technology that people don’t really want in their lives,” said Jeannette Estruth, an assistant professor of history at Santa Clara University, who is working on a book about social movements in Silicon Valley. She pointed to coalitions that banded together in the 1980s to pass laws to regulate the handling, storage and disposal of chemicals in the electronics industry in response to the dumping of toxic waste. Now, she said, people can do the same with data centers.

If these data centers are symbols, then they represent the growing bifurcation of wealth in America, where a select few stand to get much, much richer, while the rest of us are stuck with the ugly byproducts. Perhaps tech corporations shouldn’t be expected to treat the places where they build data centers as anything more than a utility closet. But as history has also amply shown, the people and politicians around them can compel them to, and should do so before it’s too late.

If they don’t, the future the tech industry builds will be a monument to their wealth — and to the rest of America’s ruin.