(This article was written by Adelle Nazarian and appeared in Newsmax. Tech Innovators Face Wrath of Resentful Left)
Not a week goes by without some online pundit performing their ritual victory dance over Elon Musk’s latest stumble.
Remember the barely concealed glee and giddy coverage when arsonists torched a dozen Teslas?
Now a judge who just ruled against him has been forced to recuse herself after engaging with posts mocking him online.
The sneering has become a blood sport. But Musk is not alone in facing this coordinated hostility – he’s simply become the most visible target of a growing phenomenon that’s metastasized across Silicon Valley.
Tech innovators are now finding themselves in the crosshairs the moment anything goes sideways, with a press corps that circles like vultures, practically salivating for the next failure to dissect.
Take Palmer Luckey.
The Oculus founder’s sin?
Donating to a pro-Trump meme group.
That transgression earned him the eternal enmity of the liberal press establishment, which now reports on every setback at his defense tech firm, Anduril, with the enthusiasm of a sports commentator calling a demolition derby.
The same playbook unfolds with Sachin Dev Duggal. As the force behind Builder.ai, he positioned his company as a revolution in AI-no-code software and led it to unicorn status before it hit the rocks of administration.
Like every high stakes technology venture, Builder.ai faced genuine challenges.
But instead of being treated as part of the messy, high-risk reality of frontier innovation, those challenges were instantly weaponized into caricature, with Duggal himself cast as the villain du jour.
What followed looked less like authentic sober scrutiny than performative theatre, where public conclusions reached before the facts were even assembled, with the full story of what went wrong still far from settled.
This is the classic liberal playbook in action: Outrage first, facts later – if ever.
Of course, there is a reason this kind of coverage resonates.
These individuals aren’t mere innovators, they’re larger-than-life figures whose outsized ambitions invite fascination when things implode.
Anyone who’s binge-watched a documentary about a failed tech startup knows the voyeuristic appeal.
You get to dissect what went wrong without having any skin in the game.
It’s rubbernecking dressed up as analysis.
What we tend to forget myself included, is that failure is not a deviation from innovation but the very condition that makes it possible.
Setbacks, reversals and spectacular collapses are hardwired into the process, especially at the frontier where new technologies are still being forged and understood.
Real progress happens precisely in that state of uncertainty.
And yet, we fixate obsessively on the visible outcomes, particularly the dramatic failures, while missing the broader momentum these efforts generate.
Musk’s early years at SpaceX and Tesla were littered with near-constant crises that brought both companies to the precipice.
Today, they’re not just surviving.
They’re setting the global pace, with entire industries and governments adapting to their lead, while competitors like Ford, BYD and others scramble desperately to catch up.
Duggal’s experience reflects the same arc. Builder.ai, which he launched a decade ago, helped build crucial early momentum around AI-driven software development at a time when the sector was still finding its footing.
That field has since become the primary engine of global economic growth.
The company’s collapse does not erase that contribution. If anything, it clarifies the limits and points toward necessary evolution.
Duggal’s new venture, SeKondBrain.ai, is focused on addressing one of the core weaknesses of current AI systems: their opacity and lack of shared context, understanding, and memory across AI and humans.
The aim is to build AI systems and models that are more interpretable and reliable.
That shift, from scale to understanding, is precisely the kind of iterative refinement following high-profile setbacks.
Ridicule is harmless noise, especially when it comes from voices the public has long since learned to discount.
However, danger emerges when it’s amplified and weaponized.
With Musk, the shift is unmistakable. Once embraced by the left, he is now closely associated with Trump’s orbit, and has completely recalibrated the incentive structure around him.
Discrediting Musk’s ventures becomes a proxy war against the broader political project he is seen to support.
It’s no accident that well-funded groups like Indivisible Action have mobilized protests against him with backing from major Democratic donors with deep pockets and even deeper grievances.
In Duggal’s case, the campaign is more subtle but equally revealing. Nearly identical criticism has materialized across multiple outlets in seemingly suspicious unison, even as evidence emerges that fundamentally challenges the dominant narrative.
The coordination may be debatable, but the pattern undeniable.
A campaign of targeted negative coverage at that scale does not itself; and boardroom disputes have a nasty habit of weaponizing whatever tools are available, from media contacts to regulatory complaints.
Bruised egos aside, these coordinated assaults have real consequences that ripple far beyond Silicon Valley boardrooms.
Innovation-first startups are uniquely vulnerable in their early years because they require massive capital injections to build unproven products and sustain years of development before generating meaningful revenue.
That dependence on investor confidence creates a precarious foundation; once doubt crystallizes into narrative, the entire structure can collapse before the technology has any chance to prove itself viable.
The 90% failures rate for startups within the first five years isn’t just about bad ideas of poor execution.
It’s often about narrative momentum overwhelming economic reality. Tesla faced faced that pressure for years, with constant and relentless “bankruptcy watch” coverage that became a self-reinforcing prophecy with short seller and skeptical journalists feeding off of each other’s pessimism and covert jealousy.
In the end, Tesla survived thanks to Musk’s resourcefulness and determination.
So, switch off the outrage machine periodically.
What looks like chaos in emerging tech is often just the messy, non-linear process of innovation working itself out.
The rush to declare success or failure early creates a version of events taking on a life of their own, independent of facts. When you amplify that narrative without questioning its origins, you might be providing cover for someone else’s agenda — helping them push the story exactly where they want it to go.
Adelle Nazarian is a Senior Fellow at the Gold Institute for International Strategy, a Washington D.C.-based foreign policy and defense think tank.
