TOAbout 700 wealthy Democratic supporters gathered at San Francisco’s Fairmont hotel on Sunday to see Kamala Harris in her first return to the city since launching her campaign for president. Among the crowd at the fundraiser, where the cheapest tickets cost $3,300 and rose to $500,000, was a mix of tech billionaires, Silicon Valley executives and venture capitalists who have been quick to endorse the vice president’s bid for the White House.
The event, which raised more than $12 million, was the latest effort by Harris’s campaign to reach out to tech Democrats and an extension of a relationship with Silicon Valley elites that dates back more than a decade.
Harris has close ties to some of the tech industry’s most influential players and prolific donors, in part due to her time as California’s attorney general and, later, a senator. While her campaign has yet to release detailed policy positions on issues like tech regulation, Harris’ record has led tech executives to speculate about whether she might take a more industry-friendly approach than Joe Biden.
Among the tech industry Democrats who have promoted or contributed to Harris’ campaign are former Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg; LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, who attended the fundraiser in San Francisco, as well as philanthropist Melinda French Gates, IAC Chairman Barry Diller and Silicon Valley venture capitalist Ron Conway. Laurene Powell Jobs, a billionaire philanthropist and ex-wife of Apple’s Steve Jobs, is a longtime friend and in 2013 hosted a fundraiser at her home for Harris. Netflix Chairman Reed Hastings, who publicly called on the president to step down after his disastrous debate performance, donated $7 million to a pro-Harris Super PACac just days before she became the presumptive nominee.
Some of these donors have come to Harris’ campaign with their own policies to promote, most notably Hoffman and Diller’s demands to fire Federal Trade Commission (FTC) Chairwoman Lina Khan. The FTC under Khan has taken an aggressive stance to regulate big tech companies, filing lawsuits against Microsoft and Amazon, which has rankled the industry. (Hoffman sits on the board of Microsoft, which It has been the objective (FTC Antitrust Litigation).
Hoffman and Diller’s demands to remove Khan while donating large sums to Harris give the appearance of billionaire donors trying to influence politics for their personal benefit, despite Hoffman’s Denials that her contribution is in exchange for influence. Harris has yet to comment on Khan or her critics’ donations, meanwhile, her campaign held an organizing event with Hoffman in early August following his attacks on the FTC chairman.
In addition to high-profile donors, Harris has also received public pledges of support from hundreds of other venture capitalists and tech workers. “VCs For Kamala” website featured more than 800 signatures from a variety of companies, while Bloomberg reported An open letter from Tech4Kamala received more than 1,200 signatures. The two groups plan to organize an event later this month.
As he battles Harris, Trump forges new ties in Silicon Valley
While Harris may have more vocal supporters than Biden in the tech sector, the industry has also seen a conservative shift and embrace of far-right beliefs that have provided her with several prominent opponents. A fundraiser for Donald Trump in San Francisco last month hosted by venture capitalists David Sacks and Chamath Palihapitiya raised about $12 million, while Silicon Valley powerhouses Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz announced they plan to make substantial donations to the former president.
Trump’s running mate JD Vance also ran his own Ohio senatorial campaign with the help of roughly $15 million in contributions from tech billionaire Peter Thiel, whose venture capital firm briefly employed Vance in 2015. Before becoming a senator, Vance worked in Silicon Valley, where he connected with a broader network of wealthy tech conservatives.
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Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, has openly supported Trump while promoting attacks on Harris and Democrats on his social media platform X. Musk shared a deepfake parody video on the platform last month that featured manipulated images of Harris, in which she was made to say “I’m the ultimate diversity hire.” Musk’s Grok chatbot also spread false information suggesting that Harris was ineligible to appear on the ballot in some states, prompting condemnation from Democratic lawmakers.
On Monday, Musk held a more than two-hour interview with Trump in which the Tesla CEO praised Trump and did not respond to any responses as the president repeated a variety of baseless election falsehoods and conspiracies.
“The entire Trump campaign is in the service of people like Elon Musk and himself: self-obsessed rich guys who will sell out to the middle class and who can’t do a live stream in 2024,” Harris campaign spokesman Joseph Costello said in a statement after the interview.
California’s Connections to Big Tech
As state attorney general and then a senator from California from 2010 to 2020, Harris served during a crucial period in the rise of Silicon Valley’s largest social networks, such as Facebook. Her record on technology legislation and litigation has over the years drawn plaudits from some privacy and regulation advocates and, at times, criticism from others for failing to try to rein in the companies as they amassed monopolies.
Harris enjoyed a fairly cozy relationship with the industry as attorney general, including developing a friendship with then-Facebook COO Sandberg and serving on the PR campaign for Sandberg’s memoir, Lean In. Sandberg gave the largest single legal contribution to her 2016 Senate campaign and, according to Emails acquired by HuffPostTwo days after that election, Harris received a message that read: “CONGRATULATIONS!!!!!!!!!!!! We need you now more than ever.” Harris did not respond.
During Harris’ time as attorney general, Facebook acquired Instagram and WhatsApp in moves that helped it expand its dominance over social media. Antitrust advocates have since criticized federal regulators and state officials for failing to investigate more intensively or block those deals, and the FTC has criticized federal regulators and state officials for failing to investigate more intensively or block those deals. citing acquisitions as evidence of anticompetitive practices in her antitrust lawsuit against Facebook. Harris has tended to avoid taking a strong stance on antitrust actions and in 2019 gave a vague answer to a direct question from the New York Times about whether big tech companies should be broken up.
The areas where Harris took a more aggressive approach toward the tech industry were online privacy and sexual abuse, choosing what is often called “revenge porn” as His star number To fight. As a senator, Harris has introduced legislation and backed initiatives to criminalize the dissemination of non-consensual sexual images online, an issue that has become more pertinent in recent years with the rise of sexualized deepfakes of celebrities, politicians and ordinary citizens. His strategy with big tech companies on the issue, Politico reported in 2019was to take a less adversarial stance publicly and instead build relationships with executives who could change the platform’s policies.
When Harris did decide to pursue legal action involving tech companies, she tended to focus on smaller platforms or individual incidents of cybercrime. One of Harris’s most high-profile prosecutions as attorney general was against the CEO and majority shareholders of Backpage, an adult classified ads site that Harris accused of enabling illegal sex work, abuse, and human trafficking. The prosecution, which Harris has touted in campaign ads, remains controversial and was strongly opposed by sex worker activists who saw Backpage as a means to safely vet clients and avoid working on the streets. Backpage’s founder and two executives were convicted on prostitution and money laundering charges; a federal judge acquitted them on appeal.
Harris’ record as a prosecutor provides other examples she could claim prove she is tough on tech, even as she maintains close relationships with industry powerbrokers. She threatened to sue Uber as attorney general in 2016 after the company promised to break state laws and put self-driving cars on San Francisco streets without regulatory approval. Uber eventually relented and ended its driverless testing days later. Meanwhile, Tony West, who became Uber’s chief legal officer a year after Harris threatened legal action, is now a front-runner on her campaign. The best-connected fundraisersHe is also his brother-in-law.
