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The Bay Area has long been, and remains, a hippie-dippie bastion of Democrats who voted overwhelmingly for Hillary Clinton in 2016 and Joe Biden in 2020. But there’s a small, powerful sect of Silicon Valley billionaires who are carving a path for the maybe-Trumpers and the MAGA-curious in the tech world.
Elon Musk explicitly endorsed Trump over the weekend and, according to The Wall Street Journal, inked a nine-figure donation promise to a new pro-Trump political action committee called America PAC. David Sacks, the billionaire tech investor, co-hosted a fundraiser last month at his San Francisco home and spoke at the Republican National Convention on Monday. Other contributors to America PAC include the Winklevoss twins, Doug Leone of Sequoia Capital and Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale, according to Federal Election Commission filings.
In the last election cycle, the few Trump backers who existed in the Valley largely kept their support under the radar. Their numbers are still small, but they’re no longer hiding, and their wallets are open.
So, what’s gotten into these guys?
For one, there might not be as many Trump supporters in the tech world as you might think.
“A mythology has been marketed by partisans suggesting a non-existent surge of tech titans abandoning the Democratic party support in a rush to support the Trump/Vance campaign. The truth is that most leading tech figures do not support Trump/Vance and those prominent ones who do, were there years ago as well,” Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, dean for leadership studies at the Yale School of Management, told CNN.
And for the ones you might have heard of, most likely, it’s not a sudden fervor for the far right’s Christian extremism or a predilection for red baseball caps. Instead, they’re looking out for the bottom line.
The two biggest pain points for people in tech have been the Biden administration’s record on antitrust enforcement and its attitude toward crypto, Adam Kovacevich, CEO of Chamber of Progress, a center-left tech policy group, told me.
“I don’t think it has as much to do with Trump per se,” he said. “I think they would have probably stayed with Biden if they felt more care and attention was being paid to the innovation economy.”
In other words: It’s not that the billionaires love Trump, it’s that they really don’t like Lina Khan, President Joe Biden’s top antitrust crusader; or Gary Gensler, the Wall Street cop who’s made no secret of his hostility toward digital assets.
Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images
Lina Khan, the FTC chair, has led an aggressive antitrust campaign, specifically targeting Big Tech.
In recent years, Khan has spearheaded lawsuits against Amazon, Microsoft and Meta. In an interview with CNN last year, Khan described those efforts as part of a broader campaign to bring more of the government’s resources to bear on the daily economic problems of ordinary Americans.
But government regulation, however well intentioned, rarely sits well with the people who are getting rich off the status quo.
Two of the most famous venture capitalists in the Valley, Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, have committed to donating to America PAC, according to several news outlets.
The pair haven’t exactly been hiding their frustration with the Biden administration, either.
“The American government is now far more hostile to new startups than it used to be,” they wrote in a recent blog post, which cited regulatory agencies using “brute force investigations, prosecutions, intimidation, and threats to hobble new industries.” They also lamented the Biden administration’s proposed tax on unrealized capital gains, which they said would “absolutely kill” startups and the venture capital industry.
One person familiar with their plans told the Financial Times that their pivot to Trump was because “there is so much at stake on the crypto side” and the growth of artificial intelligence. “It doesn’t mean support for (Trump’s) views on immigration,” the person told the paper.
Historically, Trump hasn’t shown a lot of love for tech bros, whose social media companies he long accused of having anti-conservative bias, especially after several of them suspended his accounts in response to the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. But the recent influx of tech money — facilitated in part by his 39-year-old venture-capitalist VP pick — appears to have softened some of Trump’s Luddite-ish views.
As recently as 2021, he called bitcoin a “scam against the dollar.” Lately, though, he’s positioning himself as the crypto-friendly candidate. While his campaign hasn’t laid out specific policy proposals around digital assets, it began accepting crypto donations this spring, and Trump is scheduled to speak at a national bitcoin conference next week.
The Biden administration, meanwhile, is working to mend ties with industry leaders who say they’ve been stymied by the SEC and Gensler, generally agreed to be the crypto community’s Voldemort.
To be sure, plenty of Big Tech dollars are still flowing to Biden and down-ballot Democrats from tech-world donors, including LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman and Google co-founder Eric Schmidt. But Trump’s gains from Silicon Valley have come just as some major Democratic donors have hit pause amid conversations about replacing the president on the ballot.
And, as Kovacevich notes, just because there are a few big names turning toward Trump, “they’re not speaking for everybody.”
“In fact, most of the big company CEOs aren’t terribly involved in partisan politics,” Kovacevich says. “They’re going to have to work with whoever wins the election.”
