SAN FRANCISCO — President Joe Biden is bolstering his support among tech industry Democrats, some of whom are setting aside their reluctance about a second term to focus instead on preventing a second term for the former President Donald Trump.
Biden passed through the wealthy enclaves of Northern California on Friday to raise money for his re-election campaign, giving him the opportunity to meet in person with some of the Democratic Party’s wealthiest donors and key allies in the business community.
Although the technology industry has always leaned to the left Compared to other sectors of the economy, several tech billionaires, including Tesla CEO Elon Musk, have shifted their politics to the right in recent years. This has left the impression that all of Silicon Valley may have moved with them into conservative territory, but the available evidence suggests otherwise: the technology sector is breaking for the Democrats as clearly as ever this year.
And although some technology executives and investors tried a few months ago to unseat Biden as the Democratic nominee, pushing for an alternative Like Rep. Dean Phillips of Minnesota, many of the skeptics now firmly support Biden as their only reasonable option, according to two tech industry figures who have raised money for Democrats and spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss private funding efforts.
Biden has never been the tech industry’s favorite politician, and the more than three years of his presidency so far have been difficult, largely due to his stances on regulation. He pushed a aggressive antitrust agenda including against Big technologysigned a law to potentially ban TikTok and sided with unionized autoworkers over Musk, alienate the head of Tesla and some friends of Musk.
But some technology professionals also say Biden has been helpful to the industry, including by bringing microchip manufacturing back to U.S. shores, and say there are fears that a second Trump term could bring its own disruptions, from tariffs potential up to the threat of political violence. .
It was always likely that the broader tech industry would rally behind Biden in the end because he is liberal on many other issues, such as abortion rights, said Neil Malhotra, a professor of political economy at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business.
“Political science research generally shows that people end up going home,” he said. “People may be unhappy in May and June, but when it comes to October and November, people will realize these are the only options.”
In a 2017 paper, Malhotra and two co-authors conducted research that found that elite technology entrepreneurs have a unique combination of views compared to other political donors or ordinary Democrats and Republicans. They are skeptical of government regulation but favor higher taxes for redistribution and are predisposed to racial tolerance and other liberal social values.
Malhotra said tech progressives have failed to push the Biden administration to the right on regulation, but they can still find common ground elsewhere.
“These are typically center-left people, and I think the message he’s likely to deliver is the message that will resonate with them: political institutions are at the ballot box, liberalism and liberal values are at the ballot box, democracy is at the ballot box,” he said.
One of Biden’s technology supporters echoed these sentiments. Vinod Khosla, a billionaire investor in companies including DoorDash, was scheduled to host one of Biden’s fundraisers in the San Francisco area on Friday and said democracy was his priority.
“My message to the general public is that I am a huge supporter of President Biden and we have to absolutely ensure at any cost that that dumb ass Trump doesn’t get elected and destroy democracy,” Khosla said on stage at a Bloomberg News event on Thursday.
A second fundraiser on Friday in Palo Alto was scheduled to feature several tech figures, including Marissa Mayer, the former CEO of Yahoo, according to an invitation Published by Puck News.
These funders join other big names in the technology industry who has already given to Biden this election cycle, including LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, a Tesla investor Steve Westly and Netflix co-founder Reed Hastings.
Campaign finance data indicates that the tech industry remains largely pro-Democrat. So far, tech officials, political action committees and outside groups have given Democratic candidates over Republican ones by a more than 4-to-1 margin this election cycle, with much of the fundraising still to come, according to the transparency organization OpenSecrets.
Contrarians sometimes speak louder than technology progressives. Musk, with 182 million followers on his social media app X, has said he will not vote for Biden this year and in March met with Trump in Florida, although Musk has not said how he will vote. Close allies of Musk, including David Sacks, a former donor to Democrat Hillary Clinton, have been relentless in their criticism of Biden, and Sacks attended a fundraiser for Trump in March, according to Punchbowl News.
But explicit support for Trump is hard to find in the tech world. Billionaire investor Peter Thiel, who was almost alone among major technology figures to support Trump in 2016, told The Atlantic last year that he was stepping away from politics and would not give money to Trump or any other politician this cycle.
Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison often listed among the world’s richest people, supported the presidential campaign of Sen. Tim Scott, R-S.C., and urged Trump to choose Scott as his running mate, Puck News reported.
Independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is receiving limited support in the technology industry. Last year, he won the support of Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, and in March, Kennedy chose as his running mate Nicole Shanahan, a Bay Area lawyer and ex-wife of Google co-founder Sergey Brin.
Adam Kovacevich, CEO of the Chamber of Progress, a left-leaning tech industry group, said Biden could draw comparisons to former President Barack Obama, who was widely embraced in Silicon Valley. Obama was treated like a star when visited Google headquarters as candidate in 2007.
“A lot of people in the technology sector saw themselves in President Obama, and I think in some ways Obama’s support on technology was almost the high point for any politician in the technology sector,” Kovacevich said.
“There are a lot of people in tech who wish Biden would take a different approach to the tech industry, be more of a technology champion, and are disappointed that he wasn’t, but I don’t see a lot of people embracing Trump as a result of that,” he said. he.
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