What’s With All the Trumpy VCs?
Updated at 8:07 a.m. ET on October 15, 2024
The venture capitalist Shaun Maguire is a particularly prolific poster. And lately, his takes have become almost unavoidable.
Maguire manages Sequoia Capital’s stake in Elon Musk’s various companies, including the social network formerly known as Twitter, and he regularly amplifies and excuses Musk’s extreme political opinions. He’s also fond of sharing his own. Earlier this month, he posted a theory that “antifa” is committing mass voter fraud by having ballots sent by the hundreds to vacant houses; Musk signal-boosted Maguire’s concern with the message “Anyone else seeing this sort of thing?” On October 1, Maguire advanced the perspective that “DEI was the most effective KGB opp of all time.” To his more than 150,000 followers, the VC has made it clear that he is “prepared to lose friends” over his choice to spit out the metaphorical Kool-Aid that caused him to vote for Hillary Clinton in 2016.
On X, Maguire shows up in the feed alongside other prominent VCs who support Donald Trump—among them, David Sacks of Craft Ventures and Keith Rabois of Khosla Ventures. They all express similar opinions in similar ways, and they do so more or less constantly. (Maguire, who did not respond to a request for an interview, posted to X dozens of times on a recent Saturday.) This is an example of, as Paul Krugman recently noted, the “tech bro style in American politics.” It is largely defined by a flat, good-versus-evil worldview. The good? Free speech, which Democrats want to eradicate. The evil? Immigration, which is a plot by Democrats to allow violent criminals into the country and steal the election. San Francisco? A once-great American city purposefully ruined by Democrats. Kamala Harris? Sleepwalking into World War III. Trump? According to Musk, he is “far from being a threat to democracy”—actually, voting for him is “the only way to save it!”
A “vibe shift” is under way in Silicon Valley, Michael Gibson, a VC and former vice president of grants at the Thiel Foundation, told me. Eight years ago, the notorious entrepreneur Peter Thiel was the odd man out when he announced his support for Trump. The rest of the Valley appeared to have been horrified by the candidate—particularly by his draconian and racist views on immigration, on which the tech industry relies. This year, J. D. Vance, a Thiel acolyte and former VC himself, is Trump’s running mate. Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, co-founders of the legendary VC firm Andreessen Horowitz, came out in full support of Trump in a podcast episode released just before Joe Biden dropped out of the election. (Earlier this month, Axios reported that Horowitz informed Andreessen Horowitz staff members that he and his wife, Felicia, will donate to support Harris “as a result of our friendship” with the candidate. “The Biden Administration,” his note continues, “has been exceptionally destructive on tech policy across the industry, but especially as it relates to Crypto/Blockchain and AI,” mirroring language from the podcast during which he and Andreessen endorsed Trump.)
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It’s doubtful that the thoughts of these prominent VCs reflect a broader change in the electorate—tech workers generally support Harris, and barring an unbelievable upset, California will go blue on November 5, as it has for decades. (Though as my colleague Adrienne LaFrance has pointed out, Trump’s vote share in Silicon Valley was 23 percent in 2020—small, but higher than the 20 percent he received in 2016.) And many well-known VCs back Harris, including Rabois’ colleague and Khosla Ventures’ namesake, Vinod Khosla, along with Mark Cuban and the LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman. This time around, Thiel has not thrown his weight behind Trump but has instead indicated that he would choose him over Harris if there were a gun to his head.
But it is nonetheless significant that a number of influential—and very rich—men are eager to go against the grain. Silicon Valley has historically prided itself on technological supremacy and a belief in social progress: Now many of its loudest and most well-resourced personalities support a candidate who espouses retrograde views across practically every measure of societal progress imaginable. “We are talking about a few people, but I think this also reflects the political economy of the Valley right now,” Margaret O’Mara, an American-history professor at the University of Washington and the author of The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America, told me. “There’s a great deal of money and power and influence concentrated in the hands of a very few people, including these people who are extremely online and have become extremely vocal in support of Trump.” (Sequoia Capital and Andreessen Horowitz did not respond to requests for comment for this article.)
If Trump wins, there is a nonzero chance that he would give some of these people major roles in his second administration—Musk is already lobbying for one, with apparent success. If Trump loses, the Harris administration will have highly visible and vehement critics to whom a lot of people listen. Silicon Valley’s main characters are entering the culture war and bringing their enormous fan bases with them.
To some extent, this is just business as usual. O’Mara noted that although the tech industry used to claim to be apolitical, it has always had its fair share of lobbyists in Washington, D.C., like every other industry. More than anything else, the industry’s interests have simply followed the money. In the 1980s, President Ronald Reagan supported defense spending and big contracts with the California tech companies. The result was that “Silicon Valley leaned Republican,” she said. “Silicon Valley started leaning Democratic in the Clinton years, when Clinton and Gore were big proponents of the internet and the growth of the internet industries.”
Now many of these venture capitalists are holding on to huge bets on cryptocurrency. They fear—or enjoy suggesting—that Harris is plotting to destroy the industry entirely, a perception she’s trying to combat. Some of them have circulated an unsourced rumor that she would appoint to her Cabinet Gary Gensler, who has pursued strict regulations against the crypto industry as chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission. (Meanwhile, Trump has promised to save the crypto industry from “living in hell.”) Many in the tech industry worry about Harris’s plans to raise the top capital-gains tax rate. And her support for taxing centimillionaires’ unrealized investment gains has been particularly unpopular. Gibson argued that it would destroy the VC industry completely: “We would see the innovation economy come to a halt.” Even Harris’s supporters in the tech world have pressured the campaign not to pursue the tax; “There’s optimism that this can’t possibly be real,” Aaron Levie, the CEO of Box, told The New York Times in August.
Also at issue is the labor movement. The tech industry came up during an era of lower regulation and declining union power, O’Mara pointed out. Nonunionized workforces have been essential to many of these companies’ business models, and collective action used to be more rare in their perk-filled offices. Yet during and after the pandemic, contractors and employees of major tech companies expressed dissatisfaction en masse: They wanted more diversity in the workforce, fairer treatment, and protection from the layoffs sweeping the industry. Some of them unionized. The companies faced, as O’Mara put it, “discontent among a group of people who had never been discontented.” The new labor movement has clearly rankled prominent tech figures, Musk among them. He is challenging the nearly century-old legislation behind the National Labor Relations Board, with the goal of having it declared unconstitutional.
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But business doesn’t explain everything. The American public’s attitude toward the tech industry has curdled since 2016, in large part because of critical reporting—about labor abuses, privacy problems, manipulative algorithms, and the bizarre and upsetting experiences one might have on social platforms at any given time. When I spoke with Gibson, he suggested that declining revenue in the digital-media business may have created some “rivalrous envy” on the part of journalists. (And it’s true that the media industry can and does cite the whims of tech platforms as a source of its financial problems.) “We are being lied to,” Andreessen wrote in his widely read and rueful Techno-Optimist Manifesto last year. “We are told to be angry, bitter, and resentful about technology.” This, he suggested, was not just wrongheaded but harmful. Andreessen Horowitz, at one point, launched a media publication with the stated mission of publishing writing that was “unapologetically pro-tech.”
Meanwhile, the federal government has pursued antitrust action and bipartisan efforts to regulate social media, while state governments have won huge settlements for workers. This has been a major shock: Silicon Valley was celebrated by previous Democratic administrations and was particularly welcome in both the Obama campaign and White House. Now some tech leaders are being treated like villains—which seems to have led some of them to embrace the label. “These are some of the wealthiest and most powerful people in the country, and they are presenting themselves, in a way, like Trump is,” O’Mara observed. They’re positioning themselves in public based on their grievances and their feeling that they’ve been unjustly targeted and maybe even embarrassingly spurned.
Venture capitalists are public figures in a way they didn’t used to be. Many of them were famous founders first, and they have their own brands to maintain. “It’s part of the job to promote yourself,” Lee Edwards, a general partner at Root Ventures, told me. “I think you get in the habit of just tweeting your thoughts.”
That might have hurt business not too long ago. In 2016, when Thiel endorsed Trump, Gibson had to worry about losing seats at dinners or speaking slots at events. That’s not the case now, he told me. He pointed to Mark Zuckerberg’s recent efforts to distance himself from Democrats. Although he has had a terrible relationship with Trump in the past—one that reached its nadir when the former president was temporarily banned from Facebook over the inflammatory comments he made during the riot at the Capitol on January 6, 2021—he has made tentative overtures to the candidate recently. The two have reportedly spoken one-on-one a couple of times this year, and Zuckerberg complimented Trump on his “bad ass” reaction (a fist pump) after the assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania. Zuckerberg hasn’t said how he’ll vote, but it’s a sign of change that he would talk about Trump in these terms at all. “The chill in the air has warmed up,” Gibson said.
When I spoke with Kathryn Olmsted, a historian at UC Davis and the author of Right Out of California: The 1930s and the Big Business Roots of Modern Conservatism, she said she’d be interested to hear whether this turned out to be a California story or “a very rich-person” story that happened to be taking place in California. Maybe it wasn’t so much about Silicon Valley or the tech industry as it was about billionaires. From another perspective, it could be a really rich-person story taking place on a social-media platform owned by one of those really rich people. And those people, despite their increasing public vociferousness, might actually be cloistered in their own world—isolated and deluded enough to believe that migrants are somehow a threat to their livelihood and that radical leftists are really going to steal the election.
“What I’m seeing from VCs around the country is different from what I’m seeing amongst the Twitter VCs,” Candice Matthews Brackeen, of Lightship Capital, told me. “Some of us live … off of there.” Others I spoke with pointed to an effort called VCs for Kamala, a loose organization with hundreds of signatories on a letter supporting Harris’s candidacy. That group was organized by Leslie Feinzaig, a venture capitalist and registered independent who says she has never before made a political donation.
The recent media coverage of Silicon Valley “was creating the impression that the entire industry, that all of venture capital, was going MAGA,” Feinzaig told me. “In my conversations, that was just not the case.” She wanted someone to step up and say that a lot of VCs were supporting Harris and that it wasn’t because they were on the far left. Many of them were registered Republicans, even. They simply had different priorities from the rich, angry guys posting on X. “I’m at the beginning of my career,” she said. “A lot of these guys are at the pinnacle of theirs.” She couldn’t say exactly what had happened to them. “There’s a cynicism at that point that I just don’t share.”