Two months into Donald Trump's second term, conservative leaders in the tech industry — some of whom are advising the administration — are in a state of turmoil

They are bristling at how the president's chaotic governing, unusual even by the standards of Trump 1.0, is making it increasingly difficult to run their companies.

Two months into Donald Trump's second term, conservative leaders in the tech industry — some of whom are advising the administration — are in a state of turmoil. They are bristling at how the president's chaotic governing, unusual even by the standards of Trump 1.0, is making it increasingly difficult to run their companies.

"None of my friends who voted for Trump are happy right now. Everyone is annoyed," says Reggie James, the founder of Eternal, a new-media company backed by Andreessen Horowitz. "When tech people got involved in the government, they thought Trump was going to take more of a surgical approach and act less like a wrecking ball."

Several Silicon Valley executives I spoke to — some of whom requested anonymity for fear of retribution — echoed this sense of disappointment, in particular at the havoc the Department of Government Efficiency has wreaked throughout the federal government. "We were all on board for a more business-friendly presidency, but in the end, the whole industry of crypto and AI got rug pulled," says the partner of a top-tier venture firm directly involved in the Trump administration. "The people surrounding Trump are all scamsters. They are getting rich off our votes, our dollars, and our time."

While the tech industry at large remains relatively liberal, especially among rank-and-file employees, many influential players warmed to Trump in recent years. They include high-profile venture capital firms like Andreessen Horowitz and Peter Thiel's Founders Fund, the hosts of the popular tech podcast "All-In," as well as billionaire CEOs like Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos, who donated to and had prime seating at Trump's second inauguration. But in recent weeks — amid herky-jerky tariffs, mass government layoffs, and a shaky stock market — some influential pro-Trump players are growing impatient and disenchanted.

The consternation is especially pitched among startup founders, many of whom are bracing for an economic downturn. "There is a lot of uncertainty right now, and it makes people nervous," says Sara Mauskopf, the founder of the venture-backed childcare marketplace provider Winnie. Many founders, she says, are deeply worried over whether "they're going to be able to raise funding."

Others are exasperated with what they see as unscrupulous dealings with cryptocurrencies. The tech industry itself has a fraught relationship with crypto: Investors were burned by Sam Bankman-Fried's fraudulent FTX, and many tech leaders regard cryptocurrencies as Ponzi schemes with little functional value that stain the tech industry at large. Where the Biden administration took a hard-line approach to crypto, Trump has enthusiastically embraced the crypto community. Days before he was inaugurated, he launched $Trump coin, a memecoin that reached a market cap of $14.5 billion before immediately plunging in value; today, it hovers at $2 billion.

As president, Trump has appointed the venture capitalist and "All-In" cohost David Sacks as the country's "crypto czar," hosted a Crypto Summit at the White House, pardoned the Silk Road founder and crypto folk hero Ross Ulbricht from serving double life sentences, and signed an executive order establishing a strategic bitcoin reserve and US digital asset stockpile.

On X, the Palantir cofounder and vocal Trump supporter Joe Lonsdale compared creating a digital currency reserve with taxpayer dollars to theft: "It's wrong to steal my money for grift on the left; it's also wrong to tax me for crypto bro schemes." Lonsdale tells me over email that he objects to the administration naming individual coins in "a way that moved markets and meant people could trade them ahead of time." The executive branch, he said, shouldn't be in the business of "picking winners and losers."

"The crypto stuff smells weird," says a venture capitalist who is a major backer of conservative news networks. "Both AI and crypto are fields that require a specialized, technical skill set, and just because David Sacks is a podcaster doesn't mean he's qualified in AI or crypto."

That same venture capitalist who is advising the Trump administration also claims that crypto founders are using their proximity to Trump for personal gain. Steve Witkoff, for instance, a longtime Trump associate who was appointed as the United States special envoy to the Middle East, has been cashing in on his proximity to Trump to secure private deals, this person says. Witkoff's son, Zach Witkoff, is the cofounder of World Liberty Financial, the crypto banking platform that launched Trump's memecoin. Early in March, Steve Witkoff sent cryptocurrency advocates to the Middle East to promote World Liberty Financial's latest stablecoin project, The Wall Street Journal reported. "Steve Witkoff is calling every sovereign government and saying, 'You need to support this coin if you want to be in good standing with Trump,'" the person says.

One conservative entrepreneur suggests that the relationship between Trump and the technology industry was never destined to last. "Tech people don't get politicians, and politicians don