Silicon Valley donors go to war over Kamala Harris, Trump and itself

Hoffman’s efforts are in opposition to the tech heavyweights who have thrown their support behind former president Donald Trump, sparking a political reckoning in this overwhelmingly blue region. Even as Tesla CEO Elon Musk, investors Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, Sequoia partner Doug Leone and others have very vocally endorsed Trump in recent weeks, appearing to signal a rightward shift in Silicon Valley, other tech leaders have been reinvigorated by Harris’s emergence as Biden’s likely successor.

As they activate their networks, speak out against Trump and prepare for a vicious public battle, this longtime Democratic stronghold faces something new: feuding political camps putting their names, organizing power and cash behind opposing candidates.

“This is a growing wave,” Hoffman said in an interview with The Washington Post. “I already count more people and more icons in the Kamala Harris camp than have spoken up for Trump.”

A coalition of Silicon Valley leaders is rushing into action on behalf of the potential new Democratic ticket. Former Meta chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg said she was “thrilled” to support Harris in an Instagram post. Angel investor Ron Conway called for the tech community to band around Harris, who has his “unwavering” support. Netflix co-founder Reed Hastings — one of the friends Hoffman said he called this week — backed a pro-Harris PAC with a $7 million donation. Philanthropist Melinda Gates also said she is supporting the vice president because she has an “inspiring vision for America.”

Cash from Bay Area executives had begun to dry up as donors grew concerned about President Biden’s viability, said Andrew Byrnes, a longtime campaign bundler for Harris. But over the past week, he said he has fielded hundreds of thousands of dollars that have poured in for Harris — double what he had raised for Biden in over a year.

“When the president decided to forgo the run, there was relief that we had a path forward and excitement,” he said. “And urgency that we’ve got to get this done.”

The battle for the White House has opened a chasm in the tech industry, where many power players came of age together, amassing their wealth as they built a handful of the world’s biggest internet companies. The battle has torn apart decades-long friendships and business partnerships, sparked ugly spats on social media and dredged up old tensions around gender, race and civil rights — fault lines first drawn during Trump’s 2016 campaign.

While Democratic tech leaders largely saw Barack Obama’s White House as allies, the Biden administration has angered many in tech with a stricter regulatory approach that has tightened oversight of megamergers and artificial intelligence. Cryptocurrency investors have accused Biden of targeting their industry.

Still, the sudden swell of support for Trump has been jarring for some, who see the election as bigger than the industry’s bottom line. Merci Grace, a former partner at investment firm Lightspeed Venture Partners, was devastated to see two friends working in venture capital publicly endorse Trump, motivated in part by his campaign’s business-friendly approach to tech.

Grace, who tried unsuccessfully to have children for many years, had emergency surgery in 2022 to remove a life-threatening ectopic pregnancy. A national abortion ban, a policy previously backed by Trump’s running mate, JD Vance, could make the vital medical care difficult to obtain.

“I actually cried that day,” Grace said. “It felt like they were willing to trade my actual life for money.”

For Lily Lamboy, a former manager at a tech company in San Francisco, the rhetoric from Silicon Valley has exposed a familiar divide: those who are supporting Trump to protect their company’s bottom line versus those backing the Democrats over social issues, such as abortion.

“It felt very validating in a strange way, to actually just have it be out there that there was this alignment with Trump, even though I think that’s been true for years,” she said. Finally, she saw people saying “the quiet part out loud.”

Among the elite, the fights are taking place on X, where a previous code of respect among people with a shared history and love of technology has been broken.

Hoffman said he was offended by investor David Sacks’s many online posts praising people who spoke out against Biden. For Hoffman, who was once an executive with Sacks at PayPal, the comments were a personal affront. “It’s like, okay, will you show integrity now and speak against Trump?” he said. “Let’s take that integrity challenge on your own terms.” Sacks did not reply to a request for comment.

Personal disputes have also erupted among billionaires online: X owner Musk taunted Vinod Khosla, the investor and Democratic donor who co-founded Sun Microsystems, encouraging him to support Trump in an X post last week.

“Hard for me to support someone with no values, lies, cheats, rapes, demeans women, hates immigrants like me,” Khosla responded. “He may cut my taxes or reduce some regulation but that is no reason to accept depravity in his personal values.”

Scott McNealy, Khosla’s Sun Microsystems co-founder and a Republican donor, piled on, saying he knows both Trump and Khosla well and believes that the men “would agree on so many important issues.”

Khosla responded that he “almost vomited” at his former partner’s comparison of him to Trump. (“Quit dragging family values into this,” Khosla’s operating partner, Shernaz Daver, who used to work for both men, fired at McNealy. “You are better than this!”)

Supporters of Trump, like Horowitz and Andreessen, argue that the former president would cut back on regulation and allow the tech industry to innovate and grow faster. Though during his presidency Trump was skeptical of crypto, he has since courted the industry, giving a keynote speech at the Bitcoin 2024 conference and proposing sweeping rollbacks of AI regulation, The Post reported earlier this month.

At the same time, Trump has been critical of Big Tech, accusing it of bias. He has especially targeted Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and said he is opposed to banning TikTok in the United States because it would help Meta’s social media sites, Facebook and Instagram. Zuckerberg banned Trump from Facebook after the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot.

“The shift of some tech titans to support Trump highlights the evolving dynamics within the tech industry, driven by regulatory changes, tax policies, and economic strategies and likely cultural changes,” said Wendy Anderson, a former Obama-era Defense Department official. She is now a senior vice president at Palantir but spoke in a personal capacity.

Harris helped lead Biden’s efforts to design regulation for the AI industry and could continue the current administration’s approach. But some leaders in Silicon Valley believe she could restore the relationship and some of the goodwill that existed during the Obama administration, given her ties to the region as California’s former attorney general.

Hoffman said his companies had been constrained by the Biden administration’s approach. Though he said he has not spoken to Harris, he planned to offer his voice as an “expert,” separate from his actions as a donor.

Silicon Valley “has a culture of ‘technology is super important for creating the future,’” Hoffman said. “That’s one of the reasons why the Valley was very positive on Obama, because he was very clear about that.”

“We’ve got to return to that vibrancy,” he added.