Republican presidential candidate former President Donald Trump, former first lady Melania Trump, Republican vice presidential candidate Sen. JD Vance, R-Ohio, and his wife Usha Vance together on stage at the end of the Republican National Convention, Thursday, July 18, 2024, in Milwaukee. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)
Silicon Valley billionaires such as Elon Musk, Marc Andreessen, and Chamath Palihapitiya have thrown their support behind a Trump-Vance ticket, and some even urged the former president to pick Vance as his running mate.
Earlier this week, former president Donald Trump announced venture capitalist turned Ohio Senator J.D. Vance as his running mate.
Vance was once a “Never Trump” conservative, but refashioned himself as one of Trump’s most outspoken defenders ahead of his successful 2022 run for US Senate.
Vance notably owes much of his 2022 success and his ensuing political career to tech billionaire Peter Thiel, who spent $15 million to help elect him in 2022. Since Trump picked Vance as his VP, a slew of other tech billionaires have gone public in support of Trump, their fellow billionaire.
Some of the more high-profile backers includes Tesla CEO and X owner Elon Musk, who The Wall Street Journal reported is planning to donate $45 million a month to a pro-Trump super PAC, as well as venture capitalists Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, who announced earlier this week that they plan to make large donations to groups backing Trump.
Andreessen and Horowitz say they’re supporting a Trump-Vance ticket because they believe Trump will be better for tech companies—like the ones they have stakes in—than Joe Biden because they disagree with his policies around AI, cryptocurrency, and tax policy.
Silicon Valley entrepreneur and podcaster David Sacks is also backing Trump and Vance, and in a post to X this week, he listed many other Silicon Valley executives and entrepreneurs backing Trump and Vance.
The growing number of tech billionaires supporting Trump and Vance mirrors rising support for the Republican ticket among billionaires at large.
In fact, more than five dozen billionaires are now backing Trump for president as he’s promised to slash taxes for the ultra-wealthy, according to a More Perfect Union. More than a dozen new billionaire Trump backers were revealed just this week, according to new campaign finance filings.
None of this is shocking, however, as Trump himself has spent the better part of the last several months promising billionaires tax cuts in exchange for campaign donations.
In April, Trump asked oil industry executives to donate $1 billion to his reelection campaign in exchange for his reversal of dozens of President Biden’s environmental policies should he be elected in November, for example. He also promised to stop future ones from being enacted, effectively saving them billions due to tax cuts and avoided regulations.
“So give me some of your money,” Trump said at a May fundraiser hosted by Harold Hamm, an oil executive. “I’m begging for your money.”
Trump also met with wealthy donors at a New York hotel in May, where he explained to attendees that it was in their best interest to invest in his campaign because President Biden has vowed to let Trump-era tax cuts on the wealthy and corporations expire at the end of 2025. And last month, the former president met with 80 CEOs in Washington and promised them that they’ll see tax cuts and a decrease of business regulations should he be elected.
Vance also has close ties to Big Pharma, Big Oil, and has the support of countless corporate CEOs.
Vance’s billionaire connections
Vance spent less than five years in Silicon Valley’s tech industry, where he worked as a junior venture capitalist and a biotech executive. He certainly didn’t shake up the tech world during this stint, but those few years were crucial to fostering his connections with the ultra-wealthy.
People like Thiel and Musk have funded Vance’s political aspirations over the years, while simultaneously raising his profile among other wealthy donors and on social media. In fact, Vance met Thiel over a decade ago after the investor delivered a speech at Yale, where Vance attended law school.
Vance partially credits Thiel’s speech, in which he argued law students’ time would be better spent in Silicon Valley, for influencing his decision to move to the San Francisco Bay Area just a few years later.
“Peter’s talk remains the most significant moment of my time at Yale Law School,” Vance wrote in a 2020 essay for a Catholic literary journal.
Thiel even went on to write a promotional blurb for Vance’s 2016 memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy,” which depicted his childhood growing up in Jackson, Kentucky and Middletown, Ohio. Around the time his memoir was published, Thiel gained notoriety for his support of Trump during the 2016 election.
After using his connections to snag a few mid-level positions at a few different venture firms, and even becoming a partner at one of them, Vance turned to his connections-–former Google chief executive Eric Schmidt, Andreessen, and Thiel—in 2020 to help fund his own venture capital firm.
Around the same time, Vance became interested in backing tech platforms favored by conservatives, such as social network Parler and YouTube competitor Rumble. In 2021, Vance co-founded a network of major conservative donors called the Rockbridge Network before announcing his run for office.
Vance has also gotten help from Sacks, who donated $1 million to a political action committee backing his campaign in 2022, and who hosted a fundraiser for the Trump campaign at his Pacific Heights mansion last month, which Vance himself attended.
During this event, Trump reportedly asked Sacks, tech investor Chamath Palihapitiya, and the others in attendance whom he should choose as his running mate. According to two people with knowledge of this exchange and who spoke to The New York Times, everyone agreed that Trump should choose Vance.
The former president has also “been impressed by Mr. Sacks’s wealth and media profile,” a person familiar with Trump’s thinking told The New York Times earlier this week.
Sacks celebrated Vance being chosen for the VP slot on X on Monday afternoon, saying “this is who I want by Trump’s side,” and spoke at the Republican National Convention (RNC) in Milwaukee later that night.
And although Thiel’s relationship with Trump has gotten rocky in the past several years—at a June conference in Colorado, Thiel said he would vote for Trump only “if you hold a gun to my head”—the billionaire investor is reportedly much more likely to vote for the former president now that Vance is his running mate.
As for the reason that so many tech billionaires are suddenly backing Trump and Vance, fellow billionaire Mark Cuban offered one explanation: cryptocurrency.
“It’s a bitcoin play,” Cuban said, arguing that these tech execs are backing Trump because his policies are likely to be inflationary, create geopolitical uncertainty, and destabilize the dollar’s status as the primary reserve currency used by other countries, all of which together could drive up the price of Bitcoin and make these billionaires even richer.
As the Los Angeles Times reported, Andreessen—whose firm is one of the biggest cryptocurrency investors in the world—has publicly criticized the Biden administration’s investigations into crypto startups, which are often rife with fraud and frequently scam ordinary Americans out of their savings.
“This is a brutal assault to a nascent industry that has never happened before,” Marc Andreessen recently said on the “The Ben & Marc Show” podcast.
Crypto businesses also face issues when trying to get financing from banks, and these entrepreneurs are confident Trump will make their lives easier with both regulations and borrowing.
Trump’s campaign platform has vowed to end the “unAmerican Crypto crackdown” and to “defend the right to mine Bitcoin, and ensure every American has the right to self-custody of their Digital Assets, and transact free from Government Surveillance and Control.”
Andreessen has also claimed that President Biden’s capital gains tax proposal—which would tax an individual’s assets worth $100 million or more—would make startups “completely implausible.”
Whether it’s traditional conservative issues that are motivating this circle of tech billionaires (tax cuts for the rich and corporations) or more modern conservative economic interests (cryptocurrency and AI), this week made one thing clear: they’re all in on Trump and Vance.
