Some Silicon Valley venture capitalists are beginning to take a stance against President Joe Biden even as they openly touted their support for former President Donald Trump, a big shift for an industry that has overwhelmingly backed Democrats for the past few years.
High-profile names like David Sachs, Chamath Palihapitiya, Marc Andreessen and Sean Maguire are growing disillusioned with Biden’s signature policy proposals, including his call for a 25% “millionaires’ tax” and an antitrust crackdown by the Federal Trade Commission.
“It’s impossible to support Biden,” Keith Rabois, an early PayPal executive who also helped grow LinkedIn, Square and Slide, told The New York Times.
While LaBois said he is no fan of Trump, he said his “focus is on electing Republicans to Congress and Senators.”
Tech executives are also unhappy with the heavy regulation that Biden’s nominee for Securities and Exchange Commission chairman, Gary Gensler, has imposed on the cryptocurrency industry.
Biden’s FTC chairwoman, Lina Khan, is seeking to take aggressive action against big tech companies that she criticizes for amassing too much power in the market.
Khan challenged Microsoft’s $70 billion acquisition of video game maker Activision Blizzard Inc. and Meta’s unsuccessful attempt to buy virtual reality startup Within Inc.
Last year, the FTC sued e-commerce giant Amazon for operating as a monopoly.
Andreessen, founder of the leading venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, recently said the Biden administration has “real problems.”
Andreessen said a second Trump administration would be made up of “very different kinds of people,” particularly at the SEC and FTC. He said in a recent podcast interview.
Andreessen Horowitz co-founder Ben Horowitz wrote in a blog post last year that the firm would support any politician who supports “an optimistic tech-enabled future.”
Sachs, an entrepreneur and investor who made his fortune as PayPal’s early chief operating officer, will host fundraisers for Trump and interview the former president on his podcast, “All In.”
Following the January 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol, Sachs said the incident made President Trump unfit to hold public office.
But four years under President Biden has changed Sachs’s mind. According to the New York Times.
“I have more disagreements with Biden than I do with Trump,” Sachs reportedly said at a technology conference last week.
Sachs cited Biden’s tax proposal that would penalize startup founders who tend to offer stock options to employees.
“This is a good reason for Silicon Valley to think hard about who they’re voting for,” Sachs told tech investors at the conference.
Last month, Sachs was one of a handful of prominent tech moguls to attend an “anti-Biden” dinner alongside Elon Musk and Peter Thiel.
Palihapitiya, a venture capitalist who served as Mark Zuckerberg’s vice president of user growth shortly after founding Facebook, also previously supported the Democratic Party but has since switched to supporting Trump.
According to the New York Times, Palihapitiya, founder of venture capital firm Social Capital, will co-host a fundraiser for Trump with Sachs.
During the recent election cycle, open support for Trump was rare in Silicon Valley.
“If you voted for him four years ago you would have had to apologize,” Delian Asparoukhov, an investor at the Thiel-backed Founders Fund, wrote on his X account.
Sequoia Capital investor Sean Maguire has refrained from directly endorsing Trump but has criticized Biden on social media.
After Biden suggested the U.S. would withhold certain weapons supplies to Israel during the Gaza war, Maguire accused Biden of “getting away with double standards throughout his entire presidency” — a reference to Democrats’ impeachment drive over Trump’s threats to withhold aid to Ukraine while he was president.
“Let’s see what happens this time,” Maguire wrote on his X account on May 9.
The Washington Post has reached out to the White House for comment.
