A look at which Silicon Valley figures are backing Kamala Harris, who is cozying up to Trump, and who is staying on the sidelines.
Elon Musk (left), Bill Gates (centre), and Mark Zuckerberg (right). (Image credit: Express Image/Agencies)
Millions of American citizens cast their votes on Tuesday, November 5, to choose the next president of the United States of America. Their choices were Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris, the current vice president, and former US President Donald Trump from the Republican side.
Silicon Valley has long been considered as the territory of tech progressives. But several vocal tech billionaires such as Elon Musk have veered sharply to the right in the past few years.
The question of whether it will be a Trump-led or Harris-run White House will decide the country’s approach to tackling contentious issues related to artificial intelligence, social media, antitrust regulation, and more.
While the tech industry does not seem to have a clear favourite in the 2024 US presidential elections, here is a quick look at the prominent tech figures backing Harris, the tech executives cozying up to Trump, and the ones who are quietly watching from the sidelines.
Tech leaders supporting Kamala Harris
Tech entrepreneur Mark Cuban, who is probably best known for his stint as one of the judges of hit reality show Shark Tank, has publicly endorsed Kamala Harris because “she is not an ideologue,” and has said that a second Trump administration would be devastating for small businesses. Cuban had supported Trump in 2015.
Vinod Khosla, another high-profile Silicon Valley investor, has said that he will be voting for Harris in the election. He has stakes in startups such as DoorDash, Stripe, and Instacart with an estimated $15 billion in assets, according to Bloomberg.
Former Meta COO Sheryl Sandberg endorsed Kamala Harris almost immediately after US President Joe Biden pulled out of the race. “[Harris] is an accomplished leader, a fierce advocate of abortion rights, and the strongest candidate to lead our country forward,” Sandberg said, adding that she was “thrilled to support her.”
Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates has privately donated over $50 million to a non-profit that is supporting Harris, according to a report by The New York Times.
Billionaire philanthropist Melinda French Gates, who divorced her husband Bill in 2021, said she was throwing her weight behind Harris because she is the “right candidate, right now.”
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Reed Hastings, the executive chairman of Netflix, has donated over $7 million towards Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign via a super political action committee (PAC).
LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman was one of 88 business leaders to sign an open letter extending support for Harris to be the next US president.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has not publicly endorsed any candidate in the US elections. However, the Harris Victory Fund was the recipient of a donation from Altman, according to Fortune.
Big players backing Donald Trump
Tech mogul Elon Musk has been touted as a “Trump” card in this election. While the Tesla and SpaceX CEO had refrained from endorsing anyone in the 2020 polls, Musk has clearly gone all in for Donald Trump this year. The richest man in the world has been aggressively campaigning for the Republican nominee, both on ground as well as on X, which he owns.
Musk has said he is open to heading up a government department if Trump wins, and has expressed concerns that he might be thrown in jail if Harris becomes the president.
He has not hesitated in using his vast fortune to influence the election. Musk’s $1 million-dollar daily giveaway to a random person in a swing state managed to create a lot of buzz, with the US Department of Justice (DOJ) arguing that the lottery was illegal as per election law. However, a district court in Pennsylvania, US, declined to block the giveaway on Monday.
PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel, who was also a big investor in Facebook, has said he will vote for Trump but refused to make any contributions to the former president’s campaign. “I am still very strongly pro-Trump, pro-JD. I’ve decided not to donate any money politically, but I’m supporting them in every other way possible,” he said at an event in September this year.
Marc Andreesen and Ben Horowitz, who head one of the biggest venture capital firms in Silicon Valley, have said that they are supporting and voting for Donald Trump as they believe that the Biden administration has stifled startups through over-regulation and taxation, according to a report by Tech Crunch.
Former Sequoia Capital head Douglas Leone is yet another Silicon Valley elite who is backing Trump in this election. “I have become increasingly concerned about the general direction of our country, the state of our broken immigration system, the ballooning deficit, and the foreign policy missteps, among other issues,” Leone wrote in a post on X.
Who hasn’t publicly backed anyone yet?
Only one CEO of a Fortune 500 company (Elon Musk) has publicly endorsed Trump. However, it is a different story in private. In the weeks leading up to election day, Trump has claimed that he has received several calls from top tech CEOs.
According to the former US president, Google CEO Sundar Pichai praised Trump for serving food at a McDonald’s as part of a campaign event. Apple chief Tim Cook also supposedly dialled him to discuss the iPhone maker’s regulatory woes in the European Union.
Meanwhile, Trump said that Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg had called him after the assassination attempt against the former in July this year.
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, on the other hand, reportedly intervened to stop The Washington Post from publishing an endorsement of Kamala Harris. The billionaire purchased the newspaper for $250 million in 2013. More than 2 lakh people reportedly cancelled their digital subscriptions of The Washington Post after Bezos blocked the Harris endorsement.
