Next job for Obama? Silicon Valley is hiring

WASHINGTON — Staring intently at the dual screens inside a flight simulator this month at the University of Pittsburgh, President Barack Obama tapped the controls in front of him, firing faux thrusters as he pretended to manoeuvre his space shuttle toward the International Space Station. Pulse up. Pulse to the right. Left. Down. Down. Left. Left.

“Uber shuttle,” the beaming president told reporters after a brief but successful docking mission, joking that the next market for Uber would be outer space. “In case anyone calls, we’ll be there in five minutes.”

For nearly eight years, the presidency has been Mr Obama’s science and technology playground, a place where he sought to become the advocate in chief for industries pushing advanced batteries, powerful medical devices and cutting-edge research.

“I’m a nerd, and I don’t make any apologies for it,” Mr Obama said after his faux shuttle flight.

He added: “It’s cool stuff. And it is that thing that sets us apart, that ability to imagine and hypothesise, and then test and figure stuff out, and tinker and make things and make them better, and then break them down and rework them.”

With less than three months left in his presidency, Mr Obama is preparing for a life after the White House that will most likely include a close relationship with Silicon Valley. Officials running Mr Obama’s presidential foundation have made about 10 trips to tech strongholds in California in the past year as they help him plot his next steps.

“I wouldn’t be surprised if that was one of the key focus areas for him post-presidency,” said Mr Steve Case, a co-founder of AOL.

The path from the Obama White House to the tech giants — many of them major political donors to Obama — is already well worn.

Mr David Plouffe, the architect of Obama’s 2008 campaign, is at Uber. Mr Jay Carney, his onetime press secretary, is at Amazon. Mr Dan Pfeiffer, the former communications guru, is at GoFundMe. Ms Lisa Jackson, who once led Obama’s Environmental Protection Agency, is a senior executive at Apple. Last year, Mr Chris Lehane, an alumnus of Bill Clinton’s White House, took a job at Airbnb, which offers short-term home rentals.

“This place is becoming an assisted living facility for political vets,” said Mr Matt McKenna, a former spokesman for Clinton who decamped last year to Uber and now runs a boutique public relations firm in the center of the tech world.

Suspicions that Mr Obama harbours some dreams of joining them — at least in some capacity — were given new life during the past several weeks. The president’s flight-simulator moment in Pittsburgh capped a recent flurry of White House activity highlighting American technology.

In the course of just one week this month, Mr Obama promoted new frontiers in space on CNN.com, writing that government and industry should collaborate to send a manned mission to Mars by 2030. He guest-edited an issue of Wired magazine, challenging Silicon Valley to tackle inequality and civic participation. And, with the University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon, he hosted the White House Frontiers Conference in Pittsburgh.

“I would be surprised if he did not spend a significant amount of his post-presidency time and effort connecting the resources and ideas and capabilities that he has learned about in Silicon Valley with the kinds of causes that he will choose,” said Mr Reid Hoffman, the executive chairman and co-founder of LinkedIn and a top political donor to Mr Obama.

White House aides declined to comment on the president’s plans for Jan. 21 and beyond. But Mr Phil Larson, who was one of Mr Obama’s advisers at the Office of Science and Technology Policy, called him “a true geek president.”

Mr Larson, who is now at SpaceX, the rocket company founded by the billionaire Elon Musk, said Mr Obama “loves sitting back and having scientists say magical things about the future.”

Mr Obama is the first sitting president to post a selfie on Instagram, and he proudly gave the Vulcan salute when he met Leonard Nimoy, the actor who played Spock in “Star Trek.”

He created the position of US chief technology officer on his first day in office, and he has championed initiatives on issues like funding for startups, visas for international entrepreneurs, and self-driving cars.

A number of Silicon Valley executives have joined the Obama administration, including Ms Megan J. Smith, a former Google executive who is now the US chief technology officer, and Mr Kurt DelBene, who left Microsoft in 2013 to manage Healthcare.gov and later returned to the tech company.

But Mr Obama has also angered civil liberties advocates who grew to view him as the “surveillance president,” too willing to continue government programmes, put in place after the terrorist attacks of 2001, that use technology to snoop on Americans.

A report last week from the Center for Privacy & Technology at Georgetown Law chided the FBI and the police for assembling a face-recognition database system that contains more than 117 million American adults, half of all adults in the country.

“This president has presided over an era in which universal tracking is becoming more pervasive, not just from intelligence agencies but also at the level of local law enforcement,” said Mr Ben Wizner, the director of the speech, privacy and technology project at the American Civil Liberties Union and the chief legal adviser to Edward J. Snowden. Snowden, a former government contractor, revealed in 2013 that U.S. intelligence agencies had created a mass surveillance system to comb through Americans’ phone records and international internet traffic.

The public controversy that followed the disclosures emboldened some technology executives to stand up to government intrusion, leading to disagreements about how to ensure data security and privacy while meeting the needs of law enforcement. This year, Apple refused to comply with an FBI demand that the company unlock an iPhone during a terrorism investigation.

Still, that has not stopped Silicon Valley from keeping an open door for Obama.

Mr Sam Altman, the president of Y Combinator, a Silicon Valley startup accelerator, suggested that the soon-to-be ex-president would be a good job candidate.

“We’d happily hire him,” Mr Altman joked, “and give him a chance.” THE NEW YORK TIMES