Silicon Valley is full of hubris and hugely wealthy and macho men who think they are victims, the former politician and Facebook executive Nick Clegg has said.
The former leader of the Liberal Democrats makes the claim in a new book chronicling his three careers as an MEP in Brussels, an MP and deputy prime minister in Westminster and as a communications and public policy strategist in San Francisco.
In an interview with the Guardian, Clegg heaped praise on his former boss, Mark Zuckerberg, the founder and chief executive of Meta, but was scathing of the culture fostered in the tech capital of the world where he said wealth and power was interlaced with “self pity”.
“In Silicon Valley, far from thinking they’re lucky, they think they’re hard done by, [that] they’re victims. I couldn’t, and still can’t, understand this deeply unattractive combination of machismo and self-pity.
He said: “It is a cultural thing, through from Elon Musk’s chainsaw-wielding stuff to any Silicon Valley podcast. If you’re accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression.”
The former deputy prime minister added he was not talking about Zuckerberg personally, whom Clegg described as thoughtful and endlessly curious about subjects the Facebook founder did not excel in.
Clegg has returned to London, having quit his job in the US in January, before a shift in political attitude across Silicon Valley where tech billionaires including Zuckerberg, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and Apple’s Tim Cook began engineering proximity to Donald Trump.
His new book, How to Save the Internet, goes behind the scenes at Meta and provides insight into how Silicon Valley’s insularity has blinded it to its missteps. “Everyone wears the same clothes, drives the same cars, listens to the same podcasts, follows the same fads,” Clegg said. “It’s a place born of immense sort of herd-like behaviour.”
But of the three bubbles he has inhabited in his working life, Clegg said he found Westminster “the most insufferable, partly just because of the living on past glories and the pomposity of it”.
Clegg had little to say on David Cameron, his coalition partner between 2010 and 2015, but said he would have disagreed with him on a referendum to leave the EU in 2016. The vote took place a year after the Lib Dems suffered a crushing defeat in a general election, prompting Clegg to quit as leader of the party and later take a role at the Facebook group, now known as Meta, in 2018.
Clegg is convinced Britain will rejoin the EU within his lifetime, and said if he ever saw that debate resuming, he’d return to the political fray in a heartbeat, though not in public office. “I’d drop everything – whether to stuff envelopes or man the barricades,” he said.
While Clegg said he had no desire to return to politics, his wife, Miriam González Durántez, is considering leading a new centrist party in her native Spain. But vacating the frontline of British politics doesn’t mean Clegg holds back on events in Westminster.
Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves are “decent people”, he said, but maddeningly cautious. “I just wish they took bigger swings. It’s all these endless half measures – a little reform here, a little step towards Europe there, a little placation towards Trump. I think what they’ll learn, which I learned, is you only have one crack at it.”
