Why are Silicon Valley tech leaders obsessed with Tolkien and misread him so badly?

Michiko Kakutani, Why Silicon Valley’s Most Powerful People Are So Obsessed With Hobbits, NYTimes, May 23, 2025.

There's an obvious answer to that: They're man-children.

Here's how Kakutani opens the article:

For generations of fans, J.R.R. Tolkien’s epic fantasy “The Lord of the Rings” remains their first experience of the immersive magic of fiction. The trilogy recounts how a motley group of friends set out on a journey to destroy the great Ring of Power and defeat the dark Lord Sauron, who intends to use its dreadful magic to rule all of Middle-earth through “force and fear.” The Ring corrupts all who use it, and its story endures as a potent allegory about the corrupting effects of greed and pride and what Tolkien called the evil “lust for domination.”

Given the trilogy’s idealistic overtones, it’s easy to understand why the books gained a cult following in the 1970s among hippies and Vietnam War protesters, who embraced its love of nature and rejection of consumer culture, and what they saw as its passionate denunciation of militarism and power politics. It’s more difficult to understand why the trilogy’s most prominent fans today are Silicon Valley tech lords like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel, and a rising group of far-right politicians in both Europe and the United States.

How did a trilogy of novels about wizards and elves and furry-footed hobbits become a touchstone for right-wing power brokers? How did books that evince nostalgia for a pastoral, preindustrial past win an ardent following among the people who are shaping our digital future? Why do so many of today’s high-profile fans of “The Lord of the Rings” and other fantasy and sci-fi classics insist on turning these cautionary tales into aspirational road maps for mastering the universe?

Some of the answers lie in the sheer popularity of the trilogy, which has sold more than 150 million copies across the world and permeated the public imagination, as genre fiction has moved from the margins to the mainstream.

And then there's Traditionalism:

According to the scholar Benjamin Teitelbaum, Traditionalism posits that we are currently living in a dark age brought on by modernity and globalization; if today’s corrupt status quo is toppled, we might return to a golden age of order — much the way that Tolkien’s trilogy ends with the rightful king of Arnor and Gondor assuming the throne and ushering in a new era of peace and prosperity.

A similar taste for kingly power has taken hold in Silicon Valley. In a guest essay in The Times last year, the former Apple and Google executive Kim Scott pointed to “a creeping attraction to one-man rule in some corners of tech.” This management style known as “founder mode,” she explained, “embraces the notion that a company’s founder must make decisions unilaterally rather than partner with direct reports or frontline employees.”

The new mood of autocratic certainty in Silicon Valley is summed up in a 2023 manifesto written by the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, who describes himself and his fellow travelers as “Undertaking the Hero’s Journey, rebelling against the status quo, mapping uncharted territory, conquering dragons and bringing home the spoils for our community.”

Andreessen, along with Musk and Thiel, helped muster support for Trump in Silicon Valley, and he depicts the tech entrepreneur as a conqueror who achieves “virtuous things” through brazen aggression, and villainizes anything that might slow growth and innovation — like government regulation and demoralizing concepts like “tech ethics” and “risk management.”

Love of Tolkien goes deep in Silicon Valley. Kakutani traces it back to the early days in the 1970s and then tells us:

Amazon’s founder, Jeff Bezos, a lifelong Tolkien fan, oversaw the company’s purchase of the rights to the “Lord of the Rings” back story for $250 million. Multiple seasons of its streaming series “The Rings of Power,” Vanity Fair reports, will most likely cost over $1 billion, making it the most expensive series ever made.

Thiel, a billionaire venture capitalist and mega donor to right-wing causes, says he’s read the trilogy at least 10 times. He has named several companies after magical objects in “Lord of the Rings.” Vice President JD Vance, whose careers in business and politics were nurtured by Thiel, followed in his steps. Vance has said that a lot of his “conservative worldview was influenced by Tolkien growing up,” and he named his venture firm Narya Capital after Gandalf’s magic ring of fire.

Classic fantasy and science fiction stories have informed how many fans think about the world, giving them a Manichaean vocabulary of good vs. evil, and a propensity for asserting that the future of civilization is constantly at stake. The stories also acted as an exhortation to think big and to pursue huge, improbable dreams.

And then there's Asimov's Foundation novels, which

trace a narrative arc that has resonated with right-wing politicians intent on remaking the world. It’s a story line in which a hero or a group of heroes takes on the challenge of a civilization in crisis. They wage war against a dangerous or moribund establishment and aspire to build a brave new world out of the ashes of the old. Similar plot dynamics are at work in Robert A. Heinlein’s “The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress,” which depicts a colony of freedom-loving settlers on the moon and their successful revolt against the oppressive rule of bureaucrats on planet Earth.

This does not look good. Kakutani notes:

Tolkien himself regarded “machine worshipers” with suspicion, even aversion. His experiences as a soldier who survived the gruesome World War I Battle of the Somme left him with a lasting horror of mechanized warfare; on returning home, he was dismayed as well by the factories and roadways that were transforming England’s landscape. This is why Mordor is depicted as a hellish, industrial wasteland, ravaged by war and environmental destruction, in contrast to the green, edenic Shire that the hobbits call home.

Of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, Tolkien wrote that nuclear physics — or, for that matter, any technological innovation — need not be used for war. “They need not be used at all. If there is any contemporary reference in my story at all it is to what seems to me the most widespread assumption of our time: that if a thing can be done, it must be done. This seems to me wholly false.”

Given these views, Tolkien would have been confounded by Silicon Valley’s penchant for naming tech companies after objects in “Lord of the Rings” — particularly firms with Pentagon and national security ties.

She goes on to note:

The growing embrace in Silicon Valley of “transhumanism” — including research into life extension, machine enhancements and even finding a solution to death — underscores one of the central questions animating fantasy and science fiction: What does it mean to be human? [...] In the case of “The Lord of the Rings,” Tolkien argued that mortality is part of “the given nature of Men,” and the Elves called it “the Gift of God (to Men),” allowing them “release from the weariness of Time.” Sauron, he noted, used the fear of death to lure humans to the dark side with false promises of immortality, which turned them into his servants.

Many prominent readers of “Lord of the Rings” no longer identify with the hobbits in Middle-earth but crave more magical powers (of the very sort that the dangerous Ring promises to bestow at a terrible price).

Man-children, the lot of them. There's more at the link.

Note: Tolkien was a philologist and medievalist. He did an edition of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, one of my very favorite texts. As far as I can tell, there is more wisdom in that one medieval romance than there is in the Silicon Valley elite.