For decades, Democratic presidential candidates have been able to count on Silicon Valley’s near-full support, including in 2016, when Santa Clara technocrats overwhelmingly voted for Hillary Clinton, and in 2020, when they helped Joe Biden reclaim the White House for Democrats.
In recent months, a small but extremely prominent group of Bay Area businessmen have made a rather sharp right-wing turn. The face of this “rebellion” is Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla Motors and SpaceX and the richest man in the world. Just after the failed assassination attempt on the former US president, when he called him “the toughest guy since Theodore Roosevelt,” but he had already declared that he would definitely not vote for Joe Biden or another Democratic candidate in the upcoming election.
Why is Silicon Valley turning away from Biden and the Democrats? , many investors oppose tighter fiscal policy and antitrust regulations that are supposed to “kill innovation”. In turn, Adam Kovacevich, CEO of the Chamber of Progress, quoted by CNN, adds that technocrats do not like the regulations introduced under President Joe Biden that hit the cryptocurrency market.
JD Vance is a Silicon Valley man
Currently, the driving force behind Donald Trump’s campaign in Silicon Valley is JD Vance, who was announced as the Republican Party’s candidate for vice president of the United States on July 15. The US senator and author of the book “Elegy for the Poor,” which was on the New York Times bestseller list, has for years been one of the most prominent investors in Santa Clara.
Vance’s business guru is billionaire Pether Thiel, who founded PayPal in 1998 with Elon Musk. In 2016-2017, JD Vance was a director of Thiel’s Mithril Capital. In 2022, Thiel donated $15 million to Vance’s campaign for the US Senate.
JD Vance is supposed to win over more conservatives from Silicon Valley with a more liberal approach to artificial intelligence and cryptocurrencies. They don’t even mind that the US vice presidential candidate is one of the supporters of breaking up big tech.
A few days ago, David Sacks, an investor who owns shares in companies such as Uber, SpaceX and Palantir, published on the X portal a list of 17 names of prominent businessmen who have declared financial support for Donald Trump’s election campaign.
The list, in addition to the aforementioned Elon Musk and Peter Thiel, includes Ben Horowitz (co-founder of the venture capital company Andreessen Horowitz), Joe Lonsdale (Palantir), and billionaire Doug Leone. The famous Winklevoss twins, who in 2004 sued Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook, claiming that he stole their idea for creating a social networking site (the case ended with a settlement), also declared their support for Trump.
Elon Musk himself has confirmed that he intends to generously support Donald Trump’s election campaign. A few days ago, the controversial billionaire announced that he will be donating as much as $45 million per month (for at least the next three months) to the newly founded political committee America PAC.
Apparently, Musk forgot about Donald Trump’s famous post on the Truth Social website in 2022, in which the Republican candidate – to put it mildly – ridiculed the billionaire.
“When Elon Musk came to the White House asking me to help with all his grant projects […] telling me he was a big Trump fan and a Republican, I could have said, ‘Get down on your knees and beg,’ and he would have done it.”
Elon Musk in the White House photo: Truth Social
Lower Silicon supports MAGA? Not really
To date, America PAC has raised more than $8.7 million, largely thanks to billionaires Ben Horowitz and Marc Andreessen, who are convincing more investors to support the Republican candidate’s campaign.
Importantly, for most Bay Area technocrats, the decision to donate to Trump is purely business-related. “That doesn’t mean they support Trump’s views on immigration, for example,” notes one anonymous source quoted by the Financial Times.
Musk officially supported Donald Trump for the first time. In 2020, he voted for Joe Biden. Many other investors have officially supported Democratic Party candidates in the past – Hillary Clinton and, before that, Barack Obama.
“What’s new is that a group of people who were not involved in politics before are now spending hundreds of millions of dollars to get Donald Trump elected,” said Saurav Ghosh of the Campaign Legal Center.
While Silicon Valley’s right-wing shift toward Republicans is clearly noticeable, it would be an exaggeration to say that Silicon Valley has joined the Make America Great Again movement. No representatives of the Big Six, the world’s six largest technology companies—Apple, Amazon, Alphabet, Meta, Microsoft, and Nvidia—have yet declared their support for the Republican candidate.
Source: Gazeta
Mabel is a talented author and journalist with a passion for all things technology. As an experienced writer for the 247 News Agency, she has established a reputation for her in-depth reporting and expert analysis on the latest developments in the tech industry.
