The San Francisco Bay Area has been, and remains, a bastion of Democrats who voted overwhelmingly for Hillary Clinton in 2016 and Joe Biden in 2020. But there is a small, powerful sect of Silicon Valley billionaires who are paving the way for moderate support for Donald Trump and MAGA-curious techies.
Elon Musk made a vocal endorsement of Trump over the weekend, and according to The Wall Street Journal, he signed a nine-figure donation pledge to a new pro-Trump political action committee called America PAC. David Sacks, the billionaire tech investor, hosted a fundraiser last month at his San Francisco home and spoke at the Republican National Convention on Monday (15). Other contributors to America PAC include the Winklevoss twins, Sequoia Capital’s Doug Leone and Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale, according to Federal Election Commission records.
During the last election cycle, the few Trump supporters who existed in the Valley largely kept their positions anonymous. Now, their numbers are still small, but they are no longer hiding and their wallets are open.
So what’s gotten into these guys?
Most likely, it’s not a sudden fervor for far-right Christian extremism or a fondness for red baseball caps. Instead, they’re looking at the bottom line.
The two biggest issues for tech people have been the Biden administration’s record on enforcing antitrust laws and its attitude toward crypto, said Adam Kovacevich, CEO of the Chamber of Progress, a center-left technology policy group.
“I don’t think it has so much to do with Trump per se,” he said. “I think they probably would have gone with Biden if they felt there was more care and attention being paid to the innovation economy.”
In other words: It’s not that billionaires love Trump; it’s that they really don’t like Lina Khan, President Joe Biden’s top antitrust advocate; or Gary Gensler, the Wall Street cop who has made no secret of his hostility toward digital assets.
Two of Silicon Valley’s most famous venture capitalists, Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, have pledged to donate to America PAC, according to multiple media outlets.
The pair also didn’t exactly hide their frustration with the Biden administration.
“The U.S. government is now far more hostile to new startups than it used to be,” they wrote in a recent blog post, citing regulators using “brute-force investigations, lawsuits, intimidation and threats to cripple 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.
A person familiar with his plans told the Financial Times that his shift to Trump was because “there’s a lot riding on the crypto side” and the rise of artificial intelligence. “That doesn’t mean support for (Trump’s) views on immigration,” the person told the newspaper.
Trump has historically shown little love for his tech friends, whose social media companies he has long accused of anti-conservative bias, especially after several of them suspended his accounts in response to the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. But the recent influx of money from tech barons — facilitated in part by his 39-year-old vice presidential pick as a venture capitalist — appears to have softened some of their views of Trump.
Back in 2021, he called bitcoin a “scam on the dollar.” Lately, though, he’s positioned himself as the crypto-friendly candidate. While his campaign hasn’t put forward specific policy proposals around digital assets, it has begun accepting cryptocurrency donations in recent months, 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 have been let down by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and Gensler, who generally agrees that he is the Voldemort of the crypto community.
To be sure, plenty of Big Tech dollars are still flowing to Biden and the Democrats, coming from tech-world donors including LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman and Google co-founder Eric Schmidt. But Trump’s Silicon Valley gains come as some major Democratic donors have paused amid talk of replacing the president on the ballot.
And, as Kovacevich notes, just because there are some big names turning to Trump, “they don’t speak for everyone.”
“Most CEOs of large companies are actually not very involved in partisan politics,” Kovacevich says. “They will have to work with whoever wins the election.”
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Source: CNN Brasil
Bruce Belcher is a seasoned author with over 5 years of experience in world news. He writes for online news websites and provides in-depth analysis on the world stock market. Bruce is known for his insightful perspectives and commitment to keeping the public informed.
