Tech giants use their prestige and money rather than their votes to influence the US presidential election, in part because many of them live in states that are not expected to be decisive in November’s election, such as California, Florida, New York and Texas.
But it certainly had an impact.
In a long-discussed decision following his staggering performance at the debates, the 81-year-old President Biden announced Sunday that he would not seek reelection, a shocking retirement for someone who had held public office for more than 50 years.
Those most vocal in calling for Biden to resign came from tech billionaires including Netflix founder Reed Hastings, LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman and Virgin Atlantic Airways founder Richard Branson.
Last week, Donald Trump, 78, nominated short-serving Ohio Senator J.D. Vance, 39, as his running mate. Commentators and a New York Times article attributed Vance’s selection to his close relationship with billionaire Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal and Palantir and an early investor in Facebook. Investor (and podcaster) David Sachs is a top Silicon Valley venture capitalist supporter of Trump.
And after his embarrassing 2022 dealings with President Trump, Elon Musk has become one of the former president’s most prominent supporters.
There are very real differences between Trump and Biden’s likely successor on technology and entrepreneurship. Here’s how the election outcome could impact tech policy and the region’s innovation economy.
What does a Donald Trump presidency mean for tech and the local startup community?
Two of Trump’s most influential Silicon Valley backers are Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, the founders of the venture capital firm of the same name with an illustrious investment portfolio that includes many companies that Technical.ly follows closely.
During a podcast last week, the pair detailed how they felt a Trump administration would better support technology and startups, but spent more time chronicling their grievances with Biden than praising Trump. They criticized the Biden administration’s regulatory stance on blockchain and cryptocurrency, rather than large tech companies, a criticism of prominent investor Mark Cuban. Proposed This is especially exciting for the wealthy in Silicon Valley, where Bitcoin is abundant.
President Trump’s rhetoric on immigration ignores the dominance of foreign-born residents in American technology and entrepreneurship.
One big frustration for many of these billionaires is that the Biden administration included in its fiscal 2025 budget a wealth tax that would include unrealized capital gains for taxpayers with assets over $100 million.
Under the plan, entrepreneurs with assets above that threshold would pay a new 25% minimum tax rate, among other measures, even if most of their paper wealth comes from overvalued companies (rather than cash on which to pay tax). It would require them to adopt wealth-reporting regimes that European countries have scrapped. Andreessen called it “the final straw.”
Tech jargon aside, Andreessen’s “Little Tech Agenda” would be familiar to any Republican from the 1990s or early 2000s: Cut regulations, lower corporate taxes, and solve the rest at the local level. But if there’s one thing most Americans can agree on, it’s that Trump is not a traditional Republican.
Trump has been notoriously harsh on immigration, exploiting divisive issues and overlooking the advantages foreign-born residents have in American technology and entrepreneurship. His other erratic political activities have included pushing tariffs across the economy, shrinking global allies, questioning the independence of the Federal Reserve, politicizing the judiciary and inciting election fraud.
This has been highlighted by investor and LinkedIn founder Hoffman, who said Silicon Valley wise men are “blinded” by traditional pro-business policies. Despite calling on Biden to step aside, Hoffman He warned Trump in late June. “The rule of law is good for business.”
What would a Democratic government change?
President Barack Obama was popular with Silicon Valley elites in part because his cool-guy persona was mistaken for progressive politics, allowing a bunch of smart businessmen to cosplay as leftists within a relatively traditional Democratic administration.
Obama is remembered as a progressive but governed as a centrist, while Biden is seen as a centrist but governed as a progressive.
Biden’s SEC and FTC appointments have been aggressive in regulating cryptocurrencies and big tech companies
The Biden-Harris Administration has several key economic accomplishments, including three spending bills, including the CHIPS & Science Act, which authorized the EDA Tech Hub program, awarding $500 million in advanced technology investments to 12 U.S. regions this month.
Biden’s appointees to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and Federal Trade Commission (FTC) have been unusually aggressive in regulating cryptocurrencies and big tech companies, respectively, as the U.S. economy has become more concentrated among large corporations in recent decades and advocacy groups say antitrust law favors entrepreneurship.
Americans polled say they think tech companies are doing better than big companies, but the line between the two is blurry: All of the publicly traded companies that drove the stock market last year, known as the Magnificent Seven, were tech companies, meaning the overlap between tech companies and startups is uneven.
Biden has endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris as his potential successor, and she is expected to follow in many of the footsteps the two began, though that position could change depending on whether Harris or someone else is formally endorsed as the Democratic nominee in Chicago next month.
Either way, Andreessen, Horowitz and other tech leaders are sounding a familiar pro-business warning: Democrats rely too heavily on regulation, and a healthy balance between the two parties, with leaders of integrity, could fix that problem.
Before Biden’s withdrawal, investor Cuban suggested that Trump might be a good salesman but was too polarizing to be CEO. News outlets have compiled a long list of former Trump administration officials who have spoken out against the former president’s fitness for the job.
As comedian Sam Morrill put it last fall, the Trump-Biden matchup is like choosing a ride home from a drunk or drowsy driver: One side has dropped out of the race, and what issue is worth gambling on for a chance to get a ride home with the other side?
