Kenz
Member
New YorkCNN —
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.
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.
It’s wild to see tech billionaires shifting gears. Always curious about the motives behind these moves! 
