Between the bosses of Silicon Valley and the American left, the story of a divorce

The ranch is a bit tricky to locate: in this corner of California, less than two hours from Silicon Valley, the internet connection is down, so there's no GPS, and no gas station sells road maps anymore—that archaic thing in the age of artificial intelligence (AI). After driving a little over 100 miles (160 kilometers) north of San Francisco, through parched hills and fields covered in solar panels, we finally find the small road where the stagecoach used to travel in the 19th ^century .

This is where the ancestors of former California Governor Jerry Brown, who came from Germany in 1849, ran a coaching inn where horses were changed, "before, " he says, "the arrival of the railroad killed the little road, its inn, and completely changed everything." A century later, Jerry Brown has transformed the old coaching inn into a country house. At 87, he is a handsome old man, in the chic and cultured style of the Wasps (for white Anglo- Saxon Protestants) of the Democratic Party, who reads political essays and produces oil extracted from the olive groves along the valley. In other words, a piece of the old world, less than two hours from the kings of tech.

He knows them well. "They almost all gravitated towards me, as they always have towards power," he assures. Mark Zuckerberg and the Apple giants have long financed his campaigns: "After all, they said they cared about the country and were among the richest." Jerry Brown inaugurated the headquarters of their companies, including Tesla's, in Palo Alto, even if "Elon Musk was one of the few who never really responded" to his fundraising campaigns for the California Democratic Party, he acknowledges.

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