Hours after President Joe Biden announced that he would be dropping out of the 2024 presidential race, Democratic megadonors in Silicon Valley were already lining up to support Vice President Kamala Harris at the top of their party’s ticket.
“This is what’s right for our country—and our democratic future,” wrote Reid Hoffman, cofounder and executive chair of LinkedIn and partner at Greylock Partners, on X. Last week, Hoffman had endorsed a call between 300 democratic donors and Harris and encouraged members of his network to join the call, according to The New York Times.
"Kamala Harris is the American dream personified, daughter of immigrants who met at Cal. She is also toughness personified, rising from my hometown of Oakland, California, to become the top prosecutor of the state,” Dmitri Mehlhorn, Hoffman’s former political adviser, tells WIRED. “With Scranton Joe stepping back, I cannot wait to help elect President Harris."
Aaron Levie, the chief executive of multibillion-dollar cloud storage company Box and a Democratic donor who hosted a fundraiser for Hillary Clinton in 2015, reposted Biden’s resignation letter on X and said, “Wow. Amazing leadership. Now let’s go!”
“The tech community must come together to defeat Donald Trump and save our democracy by uniting behind Vice President Kamala Harris as the Democratic nominee for President,” Ron Conway, the founder and managing partner of SV Angel, tells WIRED. “I have known Kamala for decades, and she's been a fighter, a leader, and an advocate for the tech ecosystem since the day we met. She is the best choice to defeat Donald Trump and she has my unwavering support.”
These calls for support constitute a major turn of events since Biden’s disastrous debate performance last month sent donors reeling over his chances of winning reelection. As pressure mounted on Biden to withdraw, Hoffman told WIRED earlier this month that like-minded Silicon Valley megadonors were holding off on making any further donations. “It’s definitely caused a bunch of turmoil,” he said at the time.
“Both donors and rank-and-file Democrats were kind of worried before the debate, but in the weeks since then his candidacy has become nearly impossible. The gap went from surmountable to seemingly insurmountable,” Manny Yekutiel, a San Francisco–based Democratic organizer who once served as Northern California deputy finance director for Hillary Clinton, tells WIRED. “This now opens the floodgates for much more enthusiasm for the election, the ticket, and the convention. It will make it a lot easier to organize.”
Already, donations appear to be pouring in. Harris’ presidential campaign raised more than $27.5 million in small-dollar donations over the first few hours after announcing she would seek the nomination, ActBlue wrote in a Sunday post on X.
“This does open the floodgates,” said one top tech executive, who has worked on multibillion-dollar software products in Silicon Valley and requested anonymity on account of not wanting to be seen as representative of her current or past companies.
“Fundraising for Biden really dropped off a cliff, to the point that bundlers switched to bundling for congressional campaigns because there wasn’t much coming in from big-dollar donors for Biden. I’m guessing we’ll now see a gangbusters fundraising day when the numbers come out tomorrow,” she told WIRED on Sunday.
As donations from the left reportedly dried up in recent weeks, Silicon Valley leaders like Elon Musk, venture capitalist David Sacks, and founders of the prestige venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz came out in support of former president Donald Trump and his vice presidential pick, J.D. Vance, after the assassination attempt last week, pledging millions of dollars. Though people like Sacks and Musk have said that the tech industry was growing more comfortable with reelecting the former president, there is still little evidence to suggest a seismic shift in Silicon Valley’s political leanings.
“David [Sacks] has been a Republican for a long time,” Keith Rabois, investor and top Republican donor, wrote in an email to WIRED earlier this month, saying he didn’t know how many new Republicans there actually were in Silicon Valley.
“It’s so shameful,” says Yekutiel about the increasingly vocal group of tech executives backing Trump. “It represents so much of what’s wrong in this country, so much pessimism, and it’s such a far cry from the tech community that is supposedly creating a world that is better and more connected.”
Other prominent tech donors are mulling the best way forward for Democrats now that Biden is out.
Vinod Khosla, the cofounder of Sun Microsystems and founder of Silicon Valley venture capital firm Khosla Ventures, called for an open convention and a “more moderate candidate who can easily beat Donald Trump.”
Reed Hastings, cofounder and executive chair of Netflix, called for Biden to step aside in order to give the Democratic Party a chance against Trump just a few days after the debate. Hastings and his wife, Patty Quillin, have reportedly donated more than $20 million to the Democratic Party over the past few years. In response to the news of Biden’s withdrawal, he didn’t immediately endorse Harris; instead, he wrote on X, “Dem delegates need to pick a swing state winner.”
Supporters won’t know for certain how much Silicon Valley’s new support for Harris equates to cash until her campaign announces it or new records are released from the Federal Election Commission. After Biden’s debate, donors were said to be freezing more than $90 million in funding, so the Harris campaign could expect to quickly see millions.
This story has been updated with comment from Ron Conway, the founder and managing partner of SV Angel.
