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In 2017, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg took a ride around South Bend, Indiana, to show off his company’s video streaming product, Facebook Live. From the passenger’s seat, he asked the driver, his former Harvard classmate and the city’s young mayor, BTC$102,004.22 “What do you think we need to do to get more folks like you to run for mayor and state legislature… to make it so the values of this generation can get reflected in policies?”

The driver, Pete Buttigieg, answered in the vague, rambling way you might expect from a politician with his eyes on the road. “You don’t need some magical touch to be in leadership,” he said. “A lot of those same caliber of talent who used to go to Wall Street or” – he glanced meaningfully at Zuckerberg – “Silicon Valley are now drawn to cities or to communities…”

Thirty-seven-year-old Buttigieg, with degrees from Harvard and Oxford and consulting experience at McKinsey & Company, is among those of such “caliber.” Next to septuagenarians like Bernie Sanders, Joe Biden, Elizabeth Warren and Michael Bloomberg, he looked like the grandson gamely willing to fix one of their malfunctioning iPads (this is not my original idea – the sentiment has been echoed across news outlets and Twitter). This would, as some of his millennial supporters imagine, translate to a more robust knowledge of modern technology, and therefore more informed policies.

While that was up for debate, what Buttigieg shared with many in his generation, was a relative lack of wariness of Big Tech’s power. Unlike Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders insisting that as President they’ll “break up Facebook,” Buttigieg appeared all too keen to implicate the little guys in issues surrounding data privacy along with (or perhaps to distract from) the major players. In a July interview with Recode’s Kara Swisher, Buttigieg took the time to tell listeners that Cambridge Analytica was not considered a “massive player” when it used millions of non-consenting Facebook users’ data to influence the 2016 presidential election.

But the company got all its data from Facebook, Swisher reminded.

“These data security problems exist in a way that is not fully dependent on how big or small companies are,” Buttigieg replied. “For that reason, breaking up a company isn’t going to make those problems go away.”