BARCELONA, Spain (AFP) — Maverick Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak on Tuesday took aim at big tech’s “direct role” in United States (US) politics, saying figures like Elon Musk are weighing too heavily in public life.

The designer of Apple’s earliest computers, Wozniak has long stood at one remove from Silicon Valley giants after stepping away from the pioneering firm before its vast success under co-founder Steve Jobs.

Today “all the big tech companies are just so big. It’s like they’re running our lives,” he said at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.

“Technology companies are huge, and as they’re huge and worth that much money, they have to have some political involvement,” Wozniak acknowledged, pointing to a long history of lobbying.

“But actually taking a direct role… just because they’ve made it big in technology, I don’t like that at all”.

Several big tech figures have clung to Donald Trump’s coattails as he stormed back to the presidency, such as Peter Thiel, the confounder of Paypal.

But Wozniak aimed particular criticism at X, Tesla and SpaceX chief Elon Musk, a close confidant of Trump who once worked with Thiel at Paypal.

The world’s richest man also heads the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) that has taken an axe to swathes of federal government activity.

“I think that the skills of politics are very different than the skills for technology companies to have success… it doesn’t make sense to run a government like a business,” Wozniak said.

“When you run a business, you look around and you look for a consensus… you negotiate, you compromise,” he added.

“I don’t see that happening in the case of Elon Musk… you don’t just say everything is out and start fresh,” he added.