They're old.
They’re approaching middle age, the insights that they uniquely held are no longer relevant and they want to preserve their wealth and power from a new generation of thinkers who will want to take it away.
The article The Tech Baron Seeking to Purge San Francisco of “Blues” and the radical ideas of Balaji Srinivasan (to which he's provided a link) I find very alarming, it supports my long-held view that as a society if we're not careful the biggest threat to our democracy will come from the Tech Barons (there's just too much money at stake for them not to be dictatorial).
In many ways that threat is already here, these people already hold great power and sway over governments and as such have evaded even the most reasonable of regulations for many years. That they seem insulted and peeved to the extent at having to submit to any regulation to the extent of thinking about succeeding from the democratic process is pretty much proof of their intentions.
Even today on HN we see Zuckerberg calling for the new Trump administration to intervene in EU law to stop these companies being fined because of their bad behavior, essentially they consider themselves outside the law).
Frankly, this is outrageous, that they are making such statements in public shows the extent of their brazenness and how cocksure they are of succeeding.
The average citizen ought to be deeply alarmed at what's happening.