Silicon Valley’s Trump boosters celebrate: ‘It’s time to build’
Keith Rabois.
As former President Donald Trump swept to victory on Wednesday morning, supporters in Silicon Valley posted messages of congratulations and even gloated over his return to the Oval Office.
“Warned you for months: Landslide. And best GOP popular vote in two decades,” said Keith Rabois, one of tech’s biggest Republican donors. “Godspeed to President @realDonaldTrump,” Chamath Palihapitiya posted on X. Shaun Maguire, a Sequoia investor and fellow Trump donor, heralded Trump’s comeback as the “Renaissance.”
Some of tech’s highest-profile and wealthiest names offered reactions after major news networks called the race for Trump.
Elon Musk was in the room where it happened on Tuesday night. The billionaire owner of X and Tesla watched the election results roll in with Trump from Mar-a-Lago.
“The people of America gave @realDonaldTrump a crystal clear mandate for change tonight,” Musk said.
In the past few months, the perception of the tech industry as a liberal stronghold diminished as more tech founders and investors openly supported Trump. Political advocacy, especially for Republicans, used to be largely taboo in tech, which is centered in some of the bluest areas of the country; more than 85% of San Francisco voters went for President Joe Biden in the 2020 election.
This election cycle, Republicans in tech — whether motivated by concerns about regulating cryptocurrency, limits on M&A, or support for Israel — became more emboldened to share their views.
Musk became Trump’s noisiest champion in tech. He endorsed Trump in July and had been barnstorming through the keystone swing state of Pennsylvania, holding his own rallies, and cutting $1 million checks to a lucky few who signed a petition. Trump had also received endorsements from the famous venture capitalists Doug Leone, Joe Lonsdale, and David Sacks.
“Trump was supposed to be the Left’s bad dream, a brief interlude between two decades of Obama/Biden/Harris rule,” said Sacks, a partner at Craft Ventures who spoke at the Republican National Convention in July. “As it turns out, he’s the transformational figure, a fundamental break that they couldn’t stop, no matter what they threw at him.”
By the numbers
This election cycle, investors at the top venture-capital firms plowed tens of millions of dollars into the presidential election and key congressional races. B-17 recently trawled political-donation data released by the Federal Election Commission to see how workers at tech investment firms donated.
Leone, of Sequoia Capital, was one of venture’s most prolific GOP-aligned political donors, giving almost $3.8 million to the Republican National Committee and other causes.
Nearly all donations from investors at Founders Fund, which has backed SpaceX and Palantir, went to Republicans, though the bulk of contributions came from Rabois, who left the firm in January to rejoin Khosla Ventures.
Marc Andreessen, an early Facebook and Coinbase investor via his firm Andreessen Horowitz, had a curious relationship with Trump. He donated to Trump’s election efforts, telling his podcast listeners that the former president was the best candidate to support a tech-friendly agenda, but he did not explicitly endorse Trump.
Early on Wednesday, Andreessen tweeted, “It’s time to build. 🇺🇸”
Ben Horowitz, his partner in the firm, took a diplomatic turn as the race entered its final phase. He donated to a pro-Trump super PAC and, in October, hedged his bet by saying he planned to make a significant donation to elect Kamala Harris. Horowitz told staffers in a memo that he and his wife, Felicia, had known Harris for over a decade and that “she has been a great friend to both of us during that time.”
Horowitz reposted a tweet late Tuesday from the Coinbase executive Emilie Choi, who wrote, “Crypto wins….” in response to the blockchain-friendly businessman Bernie Moreno’s taking a US Senate seat in Ohio.
