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New York CNN —
The Bay Area has long been, and remains, a stronghold of hippie Democrats who voted overwhelmingly for Hillary Clinton in 2016 and Joe Biden in 2020. But there is a small but powerful clique of Silicon Valley billionaires who are paving the way for Trump supporters and MAGA wannabes in the tech world.
Elon Musk explicitly supported Trump over the weekend, pledging a nine-figure donation to America PAC, a new pro-Trump political action committee, according to The Wall Street Journal. Billionaire tech investor David Sachs co-hosted a fundraiser at his San Francisco home last month and spoke at the Republican National Convention on Monday. Donors to America PAC include the Winklevoss twins, Sequoia Capital’s Doug Leone and Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale, according to Federal Election Commission filings.
In the last election, the few Trump supporters in Silicon Valley largely kept their support hidden. Their numbers are still small, but they are no longer hiding and they are no longer loosening their purse strings.
So what happened to these guys?
First, there may not be as many Trump supporters in the tech industry as you think.
“Partisans have created a false myth that tech moguls are abandoning their Democratic allies and flocking to the Trump/Vance campaign. The truth is that most tech moguls do not support Trump/Vance, and the prominent people who do have supported them have been doing so for years,” Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, dean of leadership studies at the Yale School of Management, told CNN.
And the people you may have heard of probably aren’t suddenly passionate about far-right Christian extremism or fond of red baseball caps. Rather, they are profit-driven.
Adam Kovacevich, CEO of the center-left tech policy group Chamber of Progress, told me that the biggest thorn in people’s side in the tech industry is the Biden administration’s record on antitrust enforcement and its stance on cryptocurrencies.
“I don’t think it has much to do with Trump per se,” he said. “I think if they felt there was more care and attention being paid to the innovation economy, they probably would have continued to support Biden.”
In other words, it’s not that billionaires love Trump, but they really hate Lina Khan, President Joe Biden’s chief antitrust fighter, and Gary Gensler, the Wall Street cop who has made no secret of his hostility toward digital assets.
Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images
FTC Chair Lina Khan has led an aggressive antitrust campaign, specifically targeting big tech companies.
In recent years, Khan has led lawsuits against Amazon, Microsoft and Meta. In an interview with CNN last year, he said those efforts were part of a broader campaign to put more government resources into the everyday economic problems of ordinary Americans.
But government regulation, no matter how well-intentioned, is rarely accepted by those who thrive on the status quo.
Two of Silicon Valley’s most prominent venture capitalists, Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, have pledged to donate to America PAC, according to multiple news outlets.
The two have not made any secret of their dissatisfaction with the Biden administration.
“The US government is now far more hostile towards startups than it has been in the past,” they said in a recent blog post, noting that regulators are using “aggressive investigations, prosecutions, intimidation, and threats to sabotage new industries.” They also lamented the Biden administration’s proposed unrealized capital gains tax, saying it would “totally kill” the startup and venture capital industries.
A person familiar with their plans told the Financial Times that the pivot to Trump was due to “a lot of interests on the crypto side” and the growth of artificial intelligence. “It doesn’t mean we endorse (Trump’s) views on immigration,” the person told the paper.
Trump hasn’t been particularly kind to tech companies in the past, despite his long-accused social media companies of anti-conservative bias, especially since several companies suspended his accounts following the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. But a recent influx of tech money, thanks in part to the 39-year-old venture capitalist he picked as his running mate, seems to be softening some of Trump’s Luddite views.
As recently as 2021, Trump called Bitcoin a “scam against the dollar.” But he has recently positioned himself as a crypto-friendly candidate. While his campaign has not offered any specific policy proposals regarding digital assets, it began accepting crypto donations this spring and Trump is scheduled to speak at the National Bitcoin Conference next week.
Meanwhile, the Biden administration is working to repair relations between the SEC and industry leaders who say they have been thwarted by Gensler, who is widely viewed as the Voldemort of the cryptocurrency community.
To be sure, plenty of big tech money is still flowing to Biden and lower-ranking Democratic candidates from tech industry donors such as LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman and Google co-founder Eric Schmidt. But Trump’s Silicon Valley funding comes just as some major Democratic donors have paused their efforts amid ongoing debate over the presidential transition.
And, as Kovacevic points out, just because a few celebrities support Trump “doesn’t mean they speak for everyone.”
“The reality is that most CEOs of large companies aren’t that involved in partisan politics,” Kovacevich said, “so they’re going to have to work with whoever wins the election.”
