Kamala Harris' tech embrace halts Donald Trump tide, fills war chest

By Biz Carson

 

Dustin Moskovitz gave $30 million to Kamala Harris’ campaign. Reed Hastings donated nearly $7 million. And Ben Horowitz gave $2.5 million to a super PAC that supports the Democratic candidate, just three months after he said he would back Donald Trump. 

The latest data from the Federal Election Commission show that Harris’ efforts to re-engage with the tech industry have paid off — literally — by encouraging new donations and stemming Silicon Valley’s pro-Trump shift. It’s helping to bolster her already substantial war chest heading into the critical final days of an election campaign where she’s been outraising and outspending Trump by more than two to one. 

 

 

Her campaign has been holding nearly weekly roundtables with business leaders in Silicon Valley and New York. It frequently involves billionaire venture capitalist Mark Cuban and Box Inc. Chief Executive Officer Aaron Levie as public envoys to the tech community, and dispatches her policy lead Brian Nelson and brother-in-law Tony West, an executive at Uber Technologies Inc., as surrogates. 

 

In her public remarks, Harris has leaned into calling herself a capitalist and talked about startups and tax credits for founders. Her economic policy speech in Pittsburgh last month included tech buzzwords ranging from artificial intelligence to blockchain and quantum computing — topics that weren’t a focus of her early presidential campaign, though she supported some pro-tech policies as a senator. 

 

A spokesperson for the Harris campaign declined to comment. 

 

The shift has tech leaders hopeful that a Harris administration will be different from President Joe Biden on the issues they care about, like antitrust enforcement and cryptocurrency regulations.

 

“One thing I believe about Kamala Harris is, being from the Bay area, she really is listening to tech,” Shannon Nash, founder of Tech4Kamala, said in an interview. “We need a president who is going to be collaborative in coming up with rule-making.”

 

Harris is also leaning on her personal friendships with Silicon Valley’s power brokers. Horowitz, who’s known the vice president for years, said in a memo to staff earlier this month that he and his wife planned to make a “significant donation” to her campaign, months after he and partner Marc Andreessen said they were backing Trump. A representative for Horowitz declined to comment.

 

Biden Frustration 

Silicon Valley has long been a deep-blue stronghold in liberal California, with backlash against those backing Republicans the norm. In 2016, over 140 tech leaders signed a scathing letter against Trump, saying he would be a “disaster for innovation.” Peter Thiel’s support became a flashpoint for the industry, with his detractors calling on groups like Y Combinator to cut ties. The tension continued after Trump was elected, with protesters barricading the doors of Uber for working with his administration. 

 

No one was protesting against Trump supporters on Sand Hill Road this summer. Many considered it more heretical to identify publicly as a Biden supporter than it was to be a Trump supporter.

 

While the broader tech industry has remained overwhelmingly Democratic, venture capitalists donated a record amount to Republicans, according to OpenSecrets data as of Sept. 22.

 

 

And they’ve been loud about it: VCs David Sacks and Chamath Palihapitiya have used their podcast All-In to broadcast a pro-Trump message. Sequoia Capital partner Shaun Maguire posted on X that he’d donate $300,000 to Trump after the former president was convicted in New York of 34 felony counts (an amount since upped to $800,000). And, of course, Elon Musk has spent at least $132 million to elect Trump and his GOP allies, while also appearing on stage with Trump and holding his own campaign rallies. 

 

“Trump has a lot of supporters in Silicon Valley; many are just afraid to admit it,” Sacks wrote after Maguire’s announcement. “But with each act of courage, like this one, the dam begins to break.” 

 

Silicon Valley’s pro-Trump shift came after four years of mounting frustration with the Biden administration, in particular the Federal Trade Commission, which sued Amazon.com Inc. and Meta Platforms Inc., and the Securities and Exchange Commission, which targeted Coinbase Global Inc.

 

“This has been a brutal assault on a nascent industry like I’ve never experienced before,” Andreessen said in the All-In podcast. “I’m in total shock that it’s happened. It’s been intensely frustrating and impossible to make progress on this with the White House.”

 

Venture firms and tech companies stepped up lobbying efforts, but ran into roadblocks on access. When the White House hosted an electric vehicle summit in 2021, Musk and Tesla Inc. were left out. Leaders like Andreessen and Horowitz had worked closely with politicians over the years, including Obama and Trump. Despite attempts to meet Biden, the duo were boxed out, getting White House officials instead.

 

Obama “was always interested in what business had to say and what technologists had to say,” Horowitz said on the podcast. “He wasn’t, ‘Talk to the hand, the hand doesn’t want to hear it,’ which is what we’ve been dealing with here.”

 

‘Very Hopeful’ 

Tech leaders like LinkedIn Corp. co-founder Reid Hoffman have found Harris, who was born in Oakland and had family members who worked in tech, to be an easier sell to Silicon Valley.

 

The initial groundswell of enthusiasm saw the creation of groups like VCs for Kamala, Tech4Kamala and Silicon Valley Women for Harris-Walz. Then came the money spigot: In August, Harris visited San Francisco for a fundraiser at the Palace Hotel attended by 700 people, which raised $12 million, the same as Sacks’ Trump fundraiser. An even larger event at the city’s famed Palace of Fine Arts in September raised another $27 million.

 

Last month, 88 corporate leaders signed a letter endorsing Harris, including the founders of tech companies like Lyft Inc., Napster Inc., Asana Inc., Yelp Inc. and Twilio Inc.

 

Meanwhile, conversations between her campaign team and Silicon Valley have trickled into Harris’ policies and speech. When she unveiled a new program aimed at attracting Black male voters and entrepreneurs, she said she would support a regulatory framework for crypto to give more investment certainty to the 20% of Black Americans who own or have owned digital assets. She’s also gone quiet on a Biden plan to tax unrealized capital gains, a move that Cuban has called an “economy killer.” In a recent Telemundo interview, Harris called herself a “pragmatic capitalist” and said she “actively works with the private sector to build up the new industries of America.”

 

It seems to be working. When her campaign unveiled a record-breaking $633 million raised in the third quarter, high-ranking tech executives from the chief technology officers of Meta, Microsoft Corp., and Salesforce Inc. to founders like Anduril’s Brian Schimpf and industry billionaires like John Doerr were on the list as donors. Timothy Draper, a former Nikki Haley loyalist, hedged his bets by giving to both Harris and Trump. 

 

Still, even for Horowitz, some wariness remained. In his memo to staff explaining his Harris donation, in which he called her “a great friend,” he stopped short of a full endorsement. 

 

“While I am very hopeful that the Harris Administration will be much better, they have not yet stated their intentions,” he wrote.

 

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