Democrat Rep. Ro Khanna has embraced a wealth tax in his home state of California, and his longtime allies in Silicon Valley are now threatening to abandon him.

California labor groups are trying to add a proposal for a statewide tax on billionaires to the November ballot. The proposal is causing a rift among Democrats and enraging some in the tech community, who warn they will leave the state if the measure is adopted. 

Khanna last week reacted to the potential exodus in a social media post, saying he echoes what President Franklin Delano Roosevelt said with “sarcasm of economic royalists when they threatened to leave, ‘I will miss them very much.'”

The post prompted not only criticism from tech leaders but also calls for Khanna to be primaried. 

“Ro has done a speed run alienating every moderate I know who has supported him. Including myself,” wrote Martin Casado, a partner at venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, in a post on X. “At least that makes voting him the f— out all the more gratifying.”  

Garry Tan, CEO of startup accelerator Y Combinator, wrote it’s “Time to primary him.”

Associates of Andreessen Horowitz and Y Combinator are among the top donors to Khanna’s congressional campaign committee, according to recent campaign finance disclosures.

The proposed ballot measure, dubbed the 2026 Billionaire Tax Act, is being pushed by the Service Employees International Union-United Healthcare Workers West labor union. If enacted, it would levy a one-time 5% tax on the assets of California billionaires to shore up an expected shortfall in the state’s health-care budget. 

Should the measure garner enough signatures to qualify for the ballot, it will be up to California voters to decide whether to implement the tax, which would be retroactive to Jan. 1, 2026. 

A major reason that tech investors, executives and entrepreneurs are united in vocal opposition is the concern that the tax would apply to unrealized gains. That means that startup founders with a net worth of over $1 billion based on the paper value of their private stock would have to pay tax on their wealth even though it’s illiquid.

“We’re absolutely going to have to figure out how our society adapts to a rapidly increasing wealth gap,” wrote Reddit co-founder and venture investor Alexis Ohanian, in a post on Sunday. “But the answer is definitely not taxing unrealized gains.”

Sarah Drory, a spokesperson for Rep. Khanna, told CNBC in a statement that the congressman is a “passionate supporter of technology and entrepreneurship,” noting that he co-wrote the CHIPS and Science Act, a federal program designed to boost domestic semiconductor manufacturing.

Drory said that while Khanna supports a “modest wealth tax on billionaires to deal with staggering inequality and to make sure people have health care,” he also advocates “for commonsense workarounds for startup founders whose companies are not profitable and who have illiquid stock.”

Democratic California Gov. Gavin Newsom, who is widely considered a contender for the presidency in 2028, opposes state-level billionaire taxes.

“You can’t isolate yourself from the 49 [other states],” Newsom said at the New York Times Dealbook conference earlier this month. “You’ve gotta be pragmatic about it.”

But pressure is growing nationally for Democrats to back efforts to tax the wealthy, as polls repeatedly show wide support for the idea. A Pew Research Center poll earlier this year found that 58% of those surveyed support raising taxes on those making more than $400,000. Among the Democrats surveyed, 74% supported the higher taxes. 

Republicans, meanwhile, have been making increasing inroads in Silicon Valley, home to a number of tech billionaires who have traditionally leaned Democratic.

Tech CEOs this year have flocked to the White House to curry the favor of President Donald Trump, who has placed tech leaders in roles within his administration.

Khanna carried California’s 17th Congressional District by more than 30 points in 2024. The deep-blue seat would be highly unlikely to flip to Republicans in 2026.

In a follow-up post on X, Khanna restated his support for a wealth tax. 

“Yes, we need entrepreneurs to commercialize disruptive innovation,” Khanna said. “But the idea that they would not start companies to make billions, or take advantage of an innovation cluster, if there is a 1-2 percent tax on their staggering wealth defies common sense and economic theory.”

Vinod Khosla, the founder of Sun Microsystems and Khosla Ventures who boasts a net worth of about $12.6 billion according to Forbes, disagreed with Khanna and said the billionaires will leave the state. 

“You are so wrong Ro,” Khosla said in a post on X. “Top prospects for generating wealth in the state will almost certainly leave the state. Every advisor would advise every enterprise that gets big momentum to have key people relocate to another state.” 

WATCH: Investors underestimating the AI revolution, analyst says

China’s Silicon Valley, Shenzhen, is about to allow self-driving taxis to operate throughout the city, ending years of pilot zones and tight limits.

Pony.ai announced Friday it was the first company to receive a robotaxi permit for the entire city, though the coverage area will be rolled out in phases.

The news marks a milestone for China’s push to integrate autonomous vehicles into everyday transport.

Until now, self-driving taxis in China have been restricted to specific areas on the outskirts of major urban areas, rather than the entire city.

Pony.ai’s rollout is part of a partnership with local taxi firm Xihu Group. The two companies formed a strategic partnership in June and plan to deploy over 1,000 of Pony.ai’s seventh-generation robotaxis across Shenzhen in the coming years.

Pony.ai unveiled its seventh-generation taxi in April this year and said it was able to cut materials costs by 70% compared with earlier models. The robotaxi operator said it developed the car together with Toyota and state-owned local operators BAIC and GAC.

A wave of defense tech startups in Silicon Valley is drawing billions in funding and reshaping America’s national security.

Anduril Industries, recently valued at $30.5 billion following its latest funding round, is among the so-called “neoprimes” — companies challenging the dominance of legacy contractors, dubbed “primes,” such as Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Boeing, General Dynamics, and RTX (formerly Raytheon).

“There’s more money than ever going to what we call the ‘neoprimes'” Jameson Darby, co-founder and director of autonomy at investment syndicate MilVet Angels, or MVA, told CNBC. “It’s still a fraction of the overall budget, but the trend is all positive.”

Other examples of defense tech startups challenging the incumbents include SpaceX and Palantir Technologies, said Darby, who is also a founding member of the U.S. Department of Defense’s Defense Innovation Unit.

Unlike the primes, these startups are faster, leaner and software-first — with many of them building things that can help close “critical technology gaps that are really important to national security,” said Ernestine Fu Mak, co-founder of MVA and founder of Brave Capital, a venture capital firm.

Venture funding for U.S.-based defense tech startups totaled about $38 billion through the first half of 2025, and could exceed its 2021 peak if the pace remains constant for the rest of the year, according to JPMorgan.

As the global war landscape changed over the past decades, the U.S. Department of Defense has identified several technologies that are critical to national security, including hypersonics, energy resilience, space technology, integrated sensing and cyber.

“In a post-9/11 world, the entire Department of Defense effectively focused on … the global war on terrorism. It was our military versus insurgents, guerrillas, asymmetric warfare, relatively low-tech fighters in most cases,” said Darby.

But war today is more focused on “great power competition,” said Mak.

“The focus is more on deterring and competing with [adversaries] in these very high-tech, multi-domain conflicts,” Mak added. “The battlefield is changing and new technologies are needed… warfare no longer being limited to land, sea, air. There’s also cyber and space domains that have become contested.”

Today, some of these Silicon Valley “neoprimes” are developing not just weapons, but also dual-use technologies that can be applied both commercially and by militaries.

“So things like artificial intelligence and autonomy have broad, sweeping commercial applications, but they’re also clearly a force multiplier in a military context,” said Darby. “[The] Department of War is rapidly assessing and adopting these dual-use technologies … they’re sending signals to the investment world, to the defense industrial base, that the U.S. government needs these things.”

That direction from the government has, in turn, provided a clear and strategic roadmap for both investors and entrepreneurs, said Mak.

Today, Mak says the syndicate’s roughly 250 members include tech founders, Wall Street financiers, company executives, intelligence officials, former military leaders and Navy SEALs. Together, they’ve invested in companies like Anduril Industries, Shield AI, Hermeus, Ursa Major and Aetherflux.

“Overall, we believe that ‘neoprimes’ cannot exist in the abstract. They require people — individuals who bring technical expertise, who carry a deep sense of mission, and who contribute complementary voices and talents. Together, this coalition forms what we are convening and calling the ‘new guard,'” said Mak.

She added that modern national security requires both the “warrior’s insight on the battlefield” and the “builder’s drive for innovation”.

“Working together with engaged, informed patriots whose participation strengthens our defense ecosystem and reinforces the very fabric of national security,” Mak said.

Mak and Darby both agree that as new technologies develop and make their way onto battlefields globally, it’s changing the way militaries fight, which can also pose new threats.

“You’re seeing these technologists, these builders … building defense tech, and the reason why they’re doing so, is not to initiate conflict, but rather to create a credible deterrent that discourages aggression,” said Mak.

“No one in defense tech is looking to wage war, rather, it’s looking to deter it and wanting adversaries to think twice before threatening peace and stability,” Mak added.

Jeff Wang got a big promotion last month. There were lots of tears, but not the happy kind.

The 39-year-old was unexpectedly named interim CEO of artificial intelligence coding startup Windsurf. The company had been in discussions with OpenAI about a potential acquisition that would have resulted in a handsome payday for many employees. But the talks fell apart and, on July 11, several founders and top researchers instead left to join Google as part of a $2.4 billion licensing deal.  

As one of the highest-ranking executives remaining at Windsurf, Wang was elevated to the top job, at least for the time being. His first order of business, he told CNBC, was to break the news at a tense all-hands meeting at the startup’s Silicon Valley headquarters.

“It was a very, very challenging day,” Wang said. “People were crying. It was very, very emotional. I was spending half the time calming down people, because they have families and they got nothing.”

Windsurf is part of a growing crop of AI startups whose founders and top researchers have been poached by megacaps like Meta, Google, Microsoft and Amazon through high-priced talent grabs that are helping the biggest companies skirt regulatory scrutiny. While the deals often produce big payouts for founders and AI leaders, they can leave investors, other employees and the remaining company in limbo.

Samir Kumar, a general partner at Touring Capital, said that what’s left is something resembling a zombie company.

“There’s a big question of what their future prospects are,” Kumar said. “Frankly, you hollowed out the organization.” 

The headline-grabbing deal came in June, when Meta rocked the tech industry by announcing a $14.3 billion investment in data labeling startup Scale AI. As part of the agreement, Meta took a 49% stake in the company, hired its CEO Alexandr Wang to lead a new superintelligence lab and said it would deepen the work it does with Scale.

A month later, Scale cut 200 full-time employees, or 14% of its staff. Meta’s investment had doubled Scale’s valuation from $14 billion last year. But that number only exists on paper.

Microsoft used a similar playbook in March 2024, when it hired Inflection AI’s co-founders and other staffers. Amazon has completed two such deals in the last year, nabbing the founders and top talent away from Adept in June 2024, and from Covariant two months later. Google inked a $2.7 billion licensing deal with Character.AI and hired its founders last August.

For Silicon Valley venture investors, long the lifeblood of risky tech startups, the system isn’t functioning as intended. Companies that would otherwise be on the path to a potential initial public offering or lucrative acquisition are getting pulled apart, with the bulk of the cash ending up in the pockets of the founders and their leading engineers.

“The money doesn’t flow as straightforwardly as it would in just a pure M&A transaction,” said Rob Toews, partner at Radical Ventures. 

The Scale deal was the exception as far as venture returns go, as Meta’s hefty cash investment resulted in big gains for early investors, most notably Accel.

Scale spokesperson Joe Osborne said the company is very much alive.

“Comparing Scale to these companies overlooks major differences in our revenue performance, company size, and deal structure,” Osborne said in a statement. He said Scale has more than 1,000 employees and generated close to $1 billion in revenue last year.

“Meta’s investment benefited our investors and employees, kept us independent, and positioned us for long-term success,” Osborne said.

VCs say one way to try and keep founders and early employees from bailing is through secondary offerings, allowing them to sell a piece of their ownership to investors so they can buy a house, repay debt or just lock in some gains.

But secondary sales can’t compete with the kinds of offers coming from deep-pocketed tech companies that are flinging open their wallets to win the AI battle. Tech investors and startup employees who spoke to CNBC said it’s a trend that threatens to thwart innovation as founders abandon their ambitious projects to work for the biggest companies in the world.

“This is not business as usual,” said Tom Chavez, co-founder of the startup studio Superset. “This is a disruption.”

Maintaining a minority stake means the acquirer could avoid triggering an FTC rule that would require a premerger review.

“They’re coming as close as possible to just getting under a majority stake of a company,” said J.B. Branch, an advocate for consumer rights at nonprofit Public Citizen. “They’re doing just about everything they can do without sort of tripping any alarms.”

Regulators aren’t completely in the dark.

The FTC last year opened probes into Microsoft’s Inflection deal and Amazon’s hiring of Adept employees. An FTC spokesperson declined to comment on the status of ongoing investigations or potential probes.

At Windsurf, the sudden departure of co-founders Varun Mohan and Douglas Chen left employees reeling. Wang was among them.

Many staffers at the all-hands meeting had been expecting to hear an announcement about a deal with OpenAI, and some even started filming the session, Wang said. The companies had been in talks about a potential acquisition since the spring.

Those discussions fell apart after Windsurf began pushing for a deal that looked less like a conventional acquisition and more like Meta’s investment in Scale, according to a person familiar with the talks. OpenAI wasn’t interested, said the person, who asked not to be named because the talks were confidential.

OpenAI’s exclusivity period for the potential acquisition expired on May 1, according to another person familiar with the discussions who also asked not to be named because the talks were confidential. Mounting antitrust concerns over Microsoft’s role in the deal, and debates over whether the tech giant would have access to Windsurf’s intellectual property, also stalled the talks, the person said.

Microsoft is a major investor in OpenAI and has pumped billions of dollars into the startup.

Wang said he wasn’t told why negotiations with OpenAI had ended.

The Google news broke on a Friday. Wang’s life changed in a hurry. He said he spent roughly 12 straight hours on the phone with investors, potential buyers and panicked customers. Employees were also barraged with incoming calls from recruiters, he said.  

At around 5 p.m., Wang received emails and text messages from the team at Cognition, another AI coding startup that’s best known for its software-building agent called Devin. After a 9 p.m. phone call stretched past midnight, Windsurf’s future began to take shape. 

Terms weren’t disclosed, but according to TechCrunch, the price was $250 million, or less than 10% the amount that OpenAI was reportedly in talks to pay.

“There’s definitely more motivation now to win than before,” Wang said. “You just got abandoned, now it’s time to prove to the world that you’re still here.”

Three weeks after Cognition’s announced purchase, that company’s CEO, Scott Wu, had more news to share. His startup was offering buyouts to Windsurf staffers who weren’t sold on their new employer.

“Cognition has an extreme performance culture, and we’re upfront about this in hiring so there are no surprises later,” Wu wrote in a post on X.

Windsurf employees who chose to accept the buyout would receive an additional nine months of pay and health care, Wang said. Some underperforming employees were let go, but would receive the same benefits, he added. 

“You cannot just have employees that came to try to ride a rocket ship,” Wang said. “You kind of need everybody to be all in.”

For now, Windsurf will continue to exist separately within Cognition, but Wang said he doesn’t know what his job will be in the future as the teams integrate more deeply.

“We’re both CEOs of each entity,” he said. “I’m actually not sure when the entities combine, what the role is going to be.”

(Wang confirmed late Tuesday that Windsurf and Cognition will remain separate and that he will continue as CEO indefinitely.)

That sort of uncertainty isn’t unique to Windsurf.

When Google inked its deal with Character.AI, the search giant’s big win was its hiring of co-founders Noam Shazeer and Daniel De Freitas, who had worked at Google in the past.

At Character, Shazeer and De Freitas wanted to do two things at once: build a foundational AI lab and an AI consumer company. A former Character employee, who was at the company when the deal took place, said he thought the agreement could be beneficial to the startup, because it would allow the company to focus solely on the consumer business.  

But many Character employees were drawn to the company because of the founders. Within a month of their exit, up to 10% of the remaining workforce departed, said the former employee, who asked not to be named because the details were confidential.

Dominic Perella, Character’s legal chief who served as the company’s interim CEO after the Google deal, said his company is far from gutted. Besides Shazeer and De Freitas, only a couple dozen researchers left, or about 25% of the company, with 70 employees still remaining, Perella said.

Perella added that the entire product team is still on board, as the company focuses on shipping new features to users rather than training AI models. Consumers use the app to create virtual characters, including for companionship, paying monthly subscriptions along the way.

Character said it now has about 20 million monthly active users, and that, as of June, paid subscribers were up 250% from a year earlier.

“That’s quite different from what you think of when you think of an acquihire,” Perella said.

Perella also said the company set up an escrow account with some of the cash from Google, and will distribute those funds to employees through July of next year, giving them some liquidity from the deal. And, he said, investors and staffers still have the opportunity to profit.

“The company didn’t leave investors or employees high and dry,” he said.

In June, 10 months after the deal was announced, Character named former Meta executive Karandeep Anand as CEO. Anand had been serving as an advisor to the company since the prior summer.

Anand said he views his role as helping Character become the social consumer app of the AI era, comparing it to what Instagram did for mobile and YouTube for the web.

“A founder CEO versus someone who comes in, who takes care of the company – that’s my job,” Anand told CNBC in an interview. “To prove that I can do this better than anyone else.”

A Google spokesperson said in a statement that the company doesn’t agree with the characterization that Character or Windsurf are zombie companies.

Inflection employees learned about their company’s deal with Microsoft at a last-minute all-hands meeting in March 2024. Inflection co-founder and CEO Mustafa Suleyman sent a Slack message instructing staffers to gather at a hotel in Mountain View, California, early the next morning, according to a former employee. 

That’s where Suleyman, who previously co-founded the AI research lab DeepMind, announced the transaction. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella also made an appearance to answer employees’ questions, said the person, who asked not to be named due to the private nature of the discussions. 

Most of Inflection’s existing employees moved to Microsoft, the person said. But Inflection continued to operate as a stand-alone company, bringing on a new CEO and staff.

Microsoft reportedly paid Inflection around $650 million, according to reports from The Information and Reuters. That capital was used to help pay the startup’s investors and license its technology in a nonexclusive capacity.

The prior year, Inflection was valued at $4 billion in a $1.3 billion investment that included capital from Microsoft and Inflection co-founder Reid Hoffman, a Microsoft board member.

Still, Hoffman said after the sale to Microsoft that the deal was positive for “everyone involved in Inflection AI.” Hoffman is also a partner at venture capital firm Greylock, which was an early investor in Inflection. 

“This agreement with Microsoft means that all of Inflection’s investors will have a good outcome today, and I anticipate good future upside,” Hoffman wrote in a post on LinkedIn.

In March, Inflection named longtime tech executive Sean White as CEO. Since losing Suleyman and most of its staff to Microsoft, the company has hired 50 employees and is now focused on building enterprise AI products, according to its website, which says its first offering called Pi is an “empathetic and conversational chatbot.”

Microsoft and Inflection declined to comment.

Covariant, founded in Berkeley, California, developed AI systems for warehouse robots. Launched in 2020, its backers included leading AI researcher Fei-Fei Li, Meta chief AI scientist, Yann LeCun, and AI pioneer Geoffrey Hinton.    

The startup had also signed up roughly a dozen customers eager to use its software, including a sportswear giant and one of the leading meal kit companies, according to a person familiar with the matter who asked not to be named in order to discuss private information.

On a Friday afternoon last August, everything changed. Some of Covariant’s employees were asked to join an emergency town hall meeting where executives tearfully announced that three of the company’s co-founders and roughly 25% of its approximately 120 workers were joining Amazon. As part of the agreement, Amazon bought a nonexclusive license for Covariant’s core technology.

Everyone on the call was told they would not be moving to Amazon, according to three former employees, who requested anonymity to speak freely about the matter.

Those who were joining included co-founder Pieter Abbeel, who was tapped to help lead Amazon’s recently created advanced AI lab in San Francisco. The other two co-founders, Peter Chen and Rocky Duan, would be put to work at Amazon building foundation models for the company’s more than 1 million robots in its warehouses.

Remaining staffers were offered far less attractive options. They could either leave Covariant immediately or stay on for about a month and a half, at which point they’d be able to receive a severance payment, the former employees said. 

A “skeleton crew” of about 10% to 15% of Covariant’s workforce is still there, one ex-employee said, calling it a ghost company. Covariant hasn’t published any business updates to its site since the Amazon deal was announced last year.

While Covariant’s founders walked away with substantial payouts, rank-and-file employees were left with far less than they expected to earn when they joined, the former employees added.

In a whistleblower complaint filed in January with the FTC, Department of Justice and Securities and Exchange Commission, a former Covariant employee claimed that the transaction was “deliberately and unlawfully structured” by Amazon to dodge antitrust scrutiny.

The company had reportedly been valued at $625 million in a 2023 funding round. Amazon spent more than $400 million to license Covariant’s technology and bring on senior technical talent at the company, according to the whistleblower complaint, which was viewed by CNBC. That figure includes a final $20 million licensing payment, set to be paid out one year after the deal date, which requires “zombie Covariant staying on life support” until that point, the complaint said.

The transaction terms handicapped Covariant’s ability to seek out future deals, according to the complaint, which was previously reported on by The Washington Post.

Ted Stinson, Covariant’s current CEO and operating chief at the time, said the company had a “decent shot” at landing one or two licensing deals with its remaining technology, according to a transcript of a recorded conversation cited in the complaint.

“But they’ll be single-digit millions, maybe double-digit millions,” Stinson said. “I mean they’ll be a fraction of what Amazon paid is my best guess.”

Stinson didn’t respond to a request for comment.

John Tye, an attorney for the former employee and a former State Department whistleblower, said the Covariant deal and other transactions like it deserve stronger government scrutiny.

“It’s not just a technical, legal matter,” Tye said in an interview. “It affects consumers who use these products. Monopolies are not typically good for the American public.”

Similar to Covariant, San Francisco startup Adept has provided few updates on its work building agentic software since its co-founders and much of its research talent were hired away by Amazon. Less than a year after taking over as CEO of Adept, Zach Brock left for OpenAI, and several employees, including the former product head, have departed for competitors like Anthropic.

Covariant and Adept didn’t respond to CNBC’s requests for comment.

Amazon spokesperson Alexandra Miller said Covariant and Adept continue to serve customers independently. She said that because Amazon’s licensing deal with Covariant isn’t exclusive, “Covariant is free to license its technology to other companies.”

Update: This story has been updated to reflect a more specific revenue figure for Scale AI.

— CNBC’s Jordan Novet contributed to this report.

WATCH: Meta approached Perplexity before massive Scale AI deal

Silicon Valley executives and financiers publicly opened their wallets in support of President Donald Trump’s 2024 presidential run. The early returns in 2025 aren’t great, to say the least.

Following Trump’s sweeping tariff plan announced Wednesday, the Nasdaq suffered steep consecutive daily drops to finish 10% lower for the week, the index’s worst performance since the beginning of the Covid pandemic in 2020.

The tech industry’s leading CEO’s rushed to contribute to Trump’s inauguration in January and paraded to Washington, D.C., for the event. Since then, it’s been a slog.

The market can always turn around, but economists and investors aren’t optimistic, and concerns are building of a potential recession. The seven most valuable U.S. tech companies lost a combined $1.8 trillion in market cap in two days.

Apple slid 14% for the week, its biggest drop in more than five years. Tesla, led by top Trump adviser Elon Musk, plunged 9.2% and is now down more than 40% for the year. Musk contributed close to $300 million to help propel Trump back to the White House.

Nvidia, Meta and Amazon all suffered double-digit drops for the week. For Amazon, a ninth straight weekly decline marks its longest such losing streak since 2008.

With Wall Street selling out of risky assets on concern that widespread tariff hikes will punish the U.S. and global economy, the fallout has drifted down to the IPO market. Online lender Klarna and ticketing marketplace StubHub delayed their IPOs due to market turbulence, just weeks after filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, and fintech company Chime is also reportedly delaying its listing.

CoreWeave, a provider of artificial intelligence infrastructure, last week became the first venture-backed company to raise more than $1 billion in a U.S. IPO since 2021. But the company slashed its offering, and trading has been very volatile in its opening days on the market. The stock plunged 12% on Friday, leaving it 17% above its offer price but below the bottom of its initial range.

“You couldn’t create a worse market and macro environment to go public,” said Phil Haslett, co-founder of EquityZen, a platform for investing in private companies. “Way too much turbulence. All flights are grounded until further notice.”

CoreWeave investor Mark Klein of SuRo Capital previously told CNBC that the company could be the first in an “IPO parade.” Now he’s backtracking.

“It appears that the IPO parade has been temporarily halted,” Klein told CNBC by email on Friday. “The current tariff situation has prompted these companies to pause and assess its impact.”

During last year’s presidential campaign, prominent venture capitalists like Marc Andreessen backed Trump, expecting that his administration would usher in a boom and eliminate some of the hurdles to startup growth set up by the Biden administration. Andreessen and his partner, Ben Horowitz, said in July that their financial support of the Trump campaign was due to what they called a better “little tech agenda.”

A spokesperson for Andreessen Horowitz declined to comment.

Some techies who supported Trump in the campaign have taken to social media to defend their positions.

Venture capitalist Keith Rabois, a managing director at Khosla Ventures, posted on X on Thursday that “Trump Derangement Syndrome has morphed into Tariff Derangement Syndrome.” He said tariffs aren’t inflationary, are effective at reducing fentanyl imports, and he expects that “most other countries will cave and cave rapidly.”

That was before China’s Finance Ministry said on Friday that it will impose a 34% tariff on all goods imported from the U.S. starting on April 10.

At Sequoia Capital, which is the biggest investor in Klarna, outspoken Trump supporter Shaun Maguire, wrote on X, “The first long-term thinking President of my lifetime,” and said in a separate post that, “The price of stocks says almost nothing about the long term health of an economy.”

However, Allianz Chief Economic Advisor Mohamed El-Erian warned on Friday that Trump’s extensive raft of import tariffs are putting the U.S. economy at risk of recession.

“You’ve had a major repricing of growth prospects, with a recession in the U.S. going up to 50% probability, you’ve seen an increase in inflation expectations, up to 3.5%,” he told CNBC’s Silvia Amaro on the sidelines of the Ambrosetti Forum in Cernobbio, Italy.

Meanwhile, executives at tech’s megacap companies were largely silent this week, and their public relations representatives declined to provide comments about their thinking.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella was in the awkward position on Friday of celebrating his company’s 50th anniversary at corporate headquarters in Redmond, Washington. Alongside Microsoft’s prior two CEOs, Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer, Nadella sat down with CNBC’s Andrew Ross Sorkin for a televised interview that was planned well before Trump’s tariff announcement.

When asked about the tariffs at the top of the interview, Nadella effectively dodged the question and avoided expressing his views about whether the new policies will hamper Microsoft’s business.

Ballmer, who was succeeded by Nadella in 2014, acknowledged to Sorkin that “disruption is very hard on people” and that, “as a Microsoft shareholder, this kind of thing is not good.” Ballmer and Gates are two of the 12 wealthiest people in the world thanks to their Microsoft fortunes.

C-suites may not be able to stay quiet for long, especially if the recent turmoil spills into next week.

Lise Buyer, who previously helped guide Google through its IPO and now works as an adviser to companies going public, said there’s no appetite for risk in the market under these conditions. But there is risk that staffers get jittery, and they’ll surely look to their leaders for some reassurance.

“Until markets settle out and we have the opportunity to access valuation levels, public company CEOs should work to calm potentially distressed employees,” Buyer said in an email. “And private company managements should refine plans to get by on dollars already in the treasury.”

— CNBC’s Hayden Field, Jordan Novet, Leslie Picker, Annie Palmer and Samantha Subin contributed to this report.

WATCH: Chime is reportedly delaying its IPO