Tech
A Wave of Tech Billionaires Are Turning to Trump, But Not Because They’re MAGA Supporters
A version of this story appeared in CNN Business’ Nightcap newsletter. To get it in your inbox, sign up for free, Here.
CNN New York —
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 paving the way for the tech world’s maybe-Trumpers and MAGA-curious.
Elon Musk said explicitly supported Trump on the weekend and, according to The Wall Street Journalhas signed a nine-figure donation pledge to a new pro-Trump political action committee called America PAC. Billionaire tech investor David Sacks 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, Sequoia Capital’s Doug Leone and Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale, according to the Federal Election Commission filings.
In the last election cycle, the few Trump supporters who were present in Silicon Valley largely maintained their support under the radar. They are still few, but they are no longer hiding and their wallets are open.
So what happened to these guys?
First of all, there may not be as many Trump supporters in the tech world as one might think.
“Partisans have marketed a mythology that suggests a nonexistent wave of tech titans abandoning Democratic Party support in a rush to support the Trump/Vance campaign. The truth is that most major tech figures do not support Trump/Vance, and the prominent ones who do were there years ago,” Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, dean of leadership studies at the Yale School of Management, told CNN.
And for those of you who may have heard of it, it’s most likely not a sudden fervor for far-right Christian extremism or a fondness for red baseball caps. Instead, they’re looking for the bottom line.
The two biggest pain points for those in the tech sector have been the Biden administration’s record on antitrust enforcement and its attitude toward cryptocurrencies, Adam Kovacevich, CEO of Chamber of Progress, a center-left tech policy group, told me.
“I don’t think it has much to do with Trump per se,” he said. “I think they probably would have stayed with Biden if they felt like there was more attention and care being given to the innovation economy.”
In other words: It’s not that billionaires love Trump, it’s that they don’t like Lina Khan, President Joe Biden’s top manager, at all. antitrust crusader; or Gary Gensler, the Wall Street cop who made no secrets of his hostility towards digital resources.
Images by Kevin Dietsch
FTC Chairwoman Lina Khan has led an aggressive antitrust campaign, specifically targeting Big Tech.
In recent years, Khan has led lawsuits against Amazon, Microsoft, and Meta. In a Interview with CNN Last year, Khan described those efforts as part of a broader campaign to direct more government resources to solving the everyday economic problems of ordinary Americans.
But government regulation, however well-intentioned, is rarely welcomed by people who get rich by exploiting the status quo.
Two of the Valley’s most famous venture capitalists, Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, have pledged to donate to America PAC, according to several news stores.
The two also made no secret of their frustration with the Biden administration.
“The U.S. government is now much more hostile to new startups than it used to be,” they wrote in a recent blog postwho cited regulators using “brute force investigations, prosecutions, intimidation and threats to stymie 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 aware of their plans he told the Financial Times that their move to Trump was because “there’s so much at stake on the cryptocurrency front” and the rise of artificial intelligence. “It’s not about supporting (Trump’s) views on immigration,” the person told the paper.
Historically, Trump hasn’t shown much love to tech bros, whose social media companies he’s long accused of having anti-conservative biases, 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 Vice President of Venture Capital pick — appears to have softened some of Trump’s Luddite views.
As recently as 2021, he called bitcoin a “dollar scam.” Lately, though, he’s been positioning himself as a cryptocurrency-friendly candidate. While his campaign hasn’t laid out any specific policy proposals on digital assets, he began accepting cryptocurrency donations this spring, and Trump is scheduled to speak at a national bitcoin conference next week.
Meanwhile, the Biden administration is working to repair the bonds with industry leaders saying they were stymied by the SEC and Gensler generally agreeing that they were the Voldemorts of the cryptocurrency community.
Sure, plenty of Big Tech dollars continue to flow to Biden and Democrats at the bottom of the list from tech donors, including LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman and Google co-founder Eric Schmidt. But Trump’s Silicon Valley gains have come just as some major Democratic donors have put conversations about replacing the president on the ballot on hold.
And, as Kovacevich notes, just because some big names are siding with Trump doesn’t mean they’re “speaking for everyone.”
“In fact, most CEOs of big companies aren’t particularly involved in partisan politics,” Kovacevich says. “They’ll have to work with whoever wins the election.”