Hardly a week passes without another billionaire endorsing Donald Trump. With Joe Biden proposing a 25% tax on those with assets over 100m ( 80m), this is no shock. The pro-Trump multimillionaire club now includes a growing number of venture capitalists. Unlike hedge funders or private equity barons, venture capitalists have traditionally held progressive credentials. They've styled themselves as the heroes of innovation, and the Democrats have done more to polish their progressive image than anyone else.

To appreciate the perversity of our reliance on US technology giants, you just need to grapple with the fact that one of the likely winners in the global "cyber-outage" – caused by the series of crippling cyber-attacks that hit public and private institutions worldwide a week ago – might be the very company whose software was compromised – Microsoft. The WannaCry ransomware used in the attack wreaked havoc on organisations including FedEx and Telefónica, as well as the NHS, where operations were cancelled, x-rays, test results and patient records became unavailable and phones did not work. In the end the global spread of the attack was halted by an "accidental hero", a 22-year-old IT security blogger from Ilfracombe, Devon. Marcus Hutchins found and inadvertently activated a "kill switch" in the malware by registering a specific domain name hidden within the program. But even before the recent WannaCry ransomware attacks, Microsoft – always seeking to deflate any responsibility for the flaws in its products – had been advocating the establishment of the digital equivalent of Geneva conventions that would protect civilians from cyber-attacks launched by nation states.

Of all the big firms in Silicon Valley, Amazon had the most to lose from Donald Trump's presidency. And lose it did, albeit briefly, its share price dropping 5% shortly after the election. During the campaign, Trump warned that Amazon had a "huge antitrust problem" – a reasonable stance for the populist that he once aspired to be. Most likely, though, his animosity had more to do with the fact Amazon's founder, Jeff Bezos, also owns the Washington Post, an influential newspaper that took an early strong dislike of Trump. By the time of Amazon's massive cloud-computing conference, which kicked off in Las Vegas at the end of November, such squabbles seem to have been forgotten.