Meta Defector Issues Devastating Psychological Takedown of Tech CEOs

Nick Clegg, a former Meta executive who left the company at the start of this year, has led many lives.

Before jumping ship to the tech world, he was a deputy prime minister of the United Kingdom, a leader of the UK’s Liberal Democrat party, and a member of Parliament — and still, the hubris and wealth he saw in Silicon Valley startled even the well-heeled British politico.

In an interview with The Guardian pegged to the release of his new book, “How To Save The Internet,” Clegg took aim at the noxious culture surrounding the San Francisco Bay Area’s “tech bro” denizens, with whom he begrudgingly rubbed shoulders during his stint at Meta, from 2018 until this year.

“You’d think, wouldn’t you, that if you were immensely powerful and rich like Elon Musk and all these other tech bros and members of that podcast community,” the former politico told The Guardian, “that you’d reflect on your good fortune compared with most other people?”

Instead, Clegg seethed, they cry persecution.

“In Silicon Valley, far from thinking they’re lucky, they think they’re hard done by, [that] they’re victims,” he continued. “I couldn’t, and still can’t, understand this deeply unattractive combination of machismo and self-pity.”

“It is a cultural thing,” Clegg noted, citing the tech podcast-sphere and Elon Musk’s onstage chainsaw stunt earlier this year, when he was still in president Donald Trump’s good graces. (Clegg was, notably, was the person who led the charge to kick Trump off of Facebook in 2021 after the January 6 riots.)

“If you’re accustomed to privilege,” he said, “equality feels like oppression.”

Clegg also charged that the self-styled free-thinkers of Silicon Valley are actually “cloyingly conformist.”

“Everyone wears the same clothes, drives the same cars, listens to the same podcasts, follows the same fads,” he recounted. “It’s a place born of immense sort of herd-like behavior.”

Clegg — who is, notably, a huge AI proponent who thinks it’s “implausible” for companies to have to pay for the copyrighted material used in their training data — made similar points in a Bloomberg interview pegged to the release of the book.

“The funniest thing is that Silicon Valley is a place that prides itself on challenging orthodoxy, conformity and conventional wisdom,” he told Bloomberg, “and yet in many ways, it’s the most conformist place I’ve ever lived in my life.”

Curiously, Clegg exempts his former bosses Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg from his disdain — but when asked about the Meta founder and CEO’s comments to podcaster Joe Rogan about how the corporate world needs more “masculine energy” and “aggression,” the former exec demurred.

“It’s not really me,” Clegg contended. “I don’t really know what to say about that.”

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