Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump (pictured) will attend a fundraiser hosted by two tech venture capitalists in San Francisco, a high-dollar event expected to draw Silicon Valley investors turned off by the Biden administration’s policies.
Venture capitalists David Sacks and Chamath Palihapitiya, as well as Sacks’ wife Jacqueline, will host the reception and dinner with Trump, according to an invitation seen by Reuters.
While San Francisco is heavily liberal – Democrat Joe Biden won 85% of the city’s vote in the 2020 election against then-president Trump – a growing number of high-profile local venture capitalists have thrown their support behind Trump ahead of his November rematch against Biden.
Trevor Traina, a San Francisco-based tech executive and former Trump ambassador to Austria, said business regulations implemented during Biden’s presidency had alienated some people in the tech industry.
Biden last week vetoed what he described as a Republican-led resolution that would “inappropriately constrain the SEC (Securities and Exchange Commission)’s ability to set forth appropriate guardrails and address future issues” relating to cryptocurrency assets.
“That might have been just the final domino,” Traina said of why some tech executives were now backing Trump.
The crypto industry is increasingly trying to influence US politicians as it faces heightened scrutiny from regulators, especially since bankruptcies at major crypto firms in 2022 spooked investors, exposed fraud and misconduct, and left millions of investors out of pocket.
Sacks and Palihapitiya have talked publicly about their investments in crypto, especially in bitcoin.
Jacob Helberg, an adviser to data analytics provider Palantir and a Democrat until about 2021, said he recently donated around $1mn to Trump’s campaign.
“In 2016, the number of people from Silicon Valley I knew who supported Trump was a sample of one, which was Peter,” Helberg said, referring to Palantir co-founder and conservative venture capitalist Peter Thiel. “Today I count them in the dozens, if not more than that. Over the course of the past six months, we’ve started to see the dam break.”
Billionaire Elon Musk, a friend of Sacks, responded on Wednesday to a post about the fundraiser on his social media platform X, writing “the SF Bay Area is shifting towards Trump”.
Economist Paul Krugman believes these heavyhitters are making their political picks based on personal interests, not the health of the nation.
“One straightforward answer is that the wealthy will almost certainly pay lower taxes – and corporations will be less regulated – if Trump wins than if Biden stays in office,” the Nobel Prize-winning Krugman wrote in April in the New York Times.
Biden has made no secret of the idea that, should he be reelected and his Democrats win an outright majority in both houses of Congress, he will place a new tax on the super-rich.