How JD Vance can help bring in big donors
Milwaukee — Amid the pomp and partying at the Republican National Convention, one development is adding to the air of triumphalism in Milwaukee: A slew of major tech players have turned their political and financial support to former President Donald Trump and the Republican Party, signaling a possible realignment in support from traditionally liberal Silicon Valley.
It began with reports at the beginning of the week that Elon Musk had pledged $45 million a month for at least the next three months to Trump’s election effort. This was reinforced by the selection of Ohio Sen. JD Vance, a former venture capitalist who has nurtured close relationships with right-leaning or libertarian tech leaders in Silicon Valley, as Trump’s running mate. By Tuesday, Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, co-founders of a high-flying venture capital firm, had endorsed Trump on their podcast and said they would kick in financially to support the former president.
It’s an adage in American politics that “money follows money,” so many expect the influx of contributions from Musk and the other tech moguls to generate a lot more cash for Republicans in the coming weeks. Those at the vanguard of this trend are taking full advantage of the momentum.
Venture capitalist David Sacks, a past supporter of Democrat Hillary Clinton and relatively early adopter of the Trump tech money machine, is urging his comrades to get off the sidelines and give to the Republican nominee. He took to X this week with a social media post that listed the growing number of Trump contributors, including Musk, Andreessen Horowitz, Joe Lonsdale, a co-founder of the data mining company, Palantir, and Doug Leone, the billionaire venture capitalist and major tech investor, who have all given to Trump.
“Come on in, the water’s warm,” Sacks wrote.
An angel investor in major companies like SpaceX, Uber and Palantir, Sacks believes Trump has a much larger base of support in Silicon Valley than is readily apparent but that those who back him are afraid to admit it publicly in a place where the prevailing politics have been overwhelmingly liberal. Still, he says his fellow techies are gaining the courage of their convictions and senses an inflection point.
“I think what we’re seeing is that each incremental endorsement makes the next one more likely,” Sacks told CBS News in an email. “Now the dominoes are falling quite quickly.”
How significant this Silicon shift is – and how lasting it will be – is a matter of debate. Some of those who closely track campaign finance say it’s a bit too early to tell. Moreover, there’s no sign yet that most of the dominant tech platforms, like Meta, Google or Apple, or their leaders, are moving into the Trump camp.
“This isn’t about Big Tech players who have traditionally leaned Democratic switching sides,” said Anna Massoglia of OpenSecrets, a nonpartisan watchdog group that keeps tabs on political donations. “Instead, we’re seeing an anti-establishment conservative faction starting to become more politically active,” Massogila added, cautioning that there is not enough data yet to know whether this represents a sea change or just a temporary shift.
Either way, campaign finance experts say the amount of money moving to Trump is significant and could have a material effect in this election cycle. If Elon Musk follows through on his pledge $45 million per month pledge, he’d immediately catapult into the ranks of the top five or 10 donors of the past few elections, including mega-donors like George Soros, who backs Democrats, and Miriam Adelson and her late husband Sheldon, who has bankrolled Trump the tune of more than $200 million.
Musk and many of his fellow tech titans who have opened up the spigot for Trump are backing Trump for the first time. Some have supported Democrats, including Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and Joe Biden in 2020.
“What’s new here is the emergence of a group of people who were not previously committed now spending hundreds of millions of dollars trying to elect Republicans and certainly trying to get Donald Trump elected,” says Saurav Ghosh, director of federal campaign finance reform at the Campaign Legal Center.
But why is this shift happening in the first place? There are different theories.
To the Trump campaign, the shift is the result of its candidate’s pro-business agenda.
“In the tech sector we’ve seen this surge of support as fundamentally driven by President Trump’s pro-business vision, reducing regulatory burdens and producing an economic environment in which American innovation can thrive,” said Brian Hughes, a senior adviser to the Trump campaign.
In some instances, the connection between policies and financial support from the tech world has been explicit. The cryptocurrency industry’s underwriting of the Trump election effort is one such example. After a months-long conversation between prominent crypto investors — including Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss — and the Trump campaign, the former president publicly embraced cryptocurrencies. The campaign’s website declared that it was part of a counteroffensive against “socialistic government control.” Not long after that, the Winklevoss twins each donated a cool $1 million in Bitcoin to Trump, while slapping at Mr. Biden’s “war against crypto.” The Trump campaign opened a portal to accept crypto donations, the first major party general election presidential campaign to do so.
The crypto industry’s embrace of Trump has been disconcerting to some Democrats. The Washington Post reported that Biden administration officials held a meeting last week to try to repair the relationship. According to the report, Biden senior adviser Anita Dunn “appeared taken aback by the open hostility” from the tech start-up community.
Even in Trump world there is a sharp debate about how meaningful the recent flow of tech money into the Trump reelection effort is. Roger Stone, one of the most fervent Trump supporters and a MAGA diehard, expressed skepticism.
“I suspect it’s transactional for this election,” Stone said in the bar of Milwaukee’s tony Trade Hotel, where the high command of the Trump campaign was staying during the convention. He attributed the development to Vance’s selection as VP.
It is true that many of the biggest players in Silicon Valley who have supported Trump, including Musk and David Sacks, are also big boosters of Vance. Musk hailed Trump’s choice on X shortly after it was announced. For his part, Sacks kicked in a million dollars to Vance’s 2022 Ohio Senate campaign, and Vance was instrumental in organizing a $12 million Trump fundraiser that Sacks co-hosted in June.
But the tech mogul most important to Vance’s political rise has a more complicated history with Trump. Peter Thiel, the mercurial co-founder of PayPal and Palantir, met Vance when he was a law student at Yale and took him under his wing, giving him jobs, contributing lavishly to his political campaigns, and eventually introducing him to Trump.
Thiel was the first major Silicon Valley player to open up his wallet for Trump, when he donated $1.25 million during the 2016 campaign. That earned him a speaking gig at the GOP convention in Cleveland and sent tremors through Silicon Valley and drew scorn from many other tech leaders.
But tech titans can be fickle with their money. Eight years after breaking a Silicon Valley taboo and wholeheartedly backing Trump, Thiel decided that he is disillusioned with the former president -– and other politicians — who he believes haven’t delivered the change they promised. He recently announced that he won’t be giving any money to Trump or other candidates. “You hold a gun to my head and I will vote for Trump,” he said at the Aspen Ideas Festival in June.
Daniel Klaidman, an investigative reporter based in New York, is the former editor-in-chief of Yahoo News and former managing editor of Newsweek. He has over two decades of experience covering politics, foreign affairs, national security and law.
