While Ohio Senator J.D. Vance’s Appalachian roots are well-known, thanks to his best-selling memoir “Hillbilly Elegy,” another aspect of Vance’s background is now gaining attention: His connection to prominent Silicon Valley billionaires.
Vance’s 2016 book about the struggles of his childhood was published right around the time he began to quietly cement his ties to a cadre of mega-wealthy tech powerbrokers who could be considered the opposite of the Rust Belt’s working class.
Now, as President Trump’s pick for vice president, many elite tech leaders are coalescing around the GOP ticket and expected to help bankroll Trump’s re-election bid.
Here are five things to know about why the tech billionaire class is backing Vance, and what it means for the 2024 presidential election.
Elon Musk and influential venture capitalists are leading the charge to support Trump/Vance
Musk endorsed Trump just minutes after a gunman in Pennsylvania tried to assassinate the former President in Pennsylvania, and he doubled down on the support when Trump announced Vance as his running mate.
During his time working in venture capital in San Francisco, Vance became a protégé of Peter Thiel, a PayPal co-founder who is considered something of a kingmaker in Silicon Valley. When Vance ran for Senate, Thiel fueled his run with a $15 million donation.
Vance also made inroads with David Sacks, a former tech executive and podcaster who has become a loud cheerleader for Musk since the billionaire acquired Twitter, now X. Sacks recently held a Trump fundraiser at his home in San Francisco, raking in $12 million for the former president. Sacks this week spoke at the Republican National Convention, where he spent much of his time bashing President Biden over the U.S. supporting Ukraine in its war with Russia.
Using X as a megaphone, Musk and Sacks have been blasting out daily rallying cries for Trump and Vance. “Come on in,” Sacks wrote on X on Tuesday following a list of prominent tech figures now backing Trump. “The water’s warm.”
Tech billionaires are already giving millions and expected to turbocharge Trump/Vance campaign
Shortly after Vance was announced as Trump’s VP pick, a new tech-aligned super political action committee was unveiled called America PAC.
With the backing of the crypto billionaire Winklevoss twins, the co-founder data analytics firm Palantir Joe Lonsdale, Doug Leone of powerful VC Sequoia Capital and others, the group has raised more than $8 million, according to a recent Federal Election Commission filing.
The group’s war chest could turn into a formidable force for the Trump campaign.
Andreessen and Horowitz are on tap to pump the group with cash. And the Wall Street Journal has reported that Elon Musk could funnel as much as $45 million a month into the effort.
Trump’s Vance pick has drawn praise in crypto circles, with investors hoping for lax regulations of the digital currency. In his latest federal financial disclosure, Vance reported that he owns between $100,000 and $250,000 in Bitcoin.
Tech elite see Vance as change-agent on tax policy, AI and crypto regulations
Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, who operate the prominent venture capital firm named after them, released a podcast on Tuesday laying out their rationale for backing Trump and Vance.
Horowitz said he was reluctant to wade into politics, but that he had no other choice, since “the future of our business, the future of technology, new technology, and the future of America is literally at stake,” he said.
The duo said the Biden administration’s proposed regulations for cryptocurrency and artificial intelligence are too heavy-handed. They said they fear a second Biden term would crimp American innovation.
Their firm has invested in numerous crypto and AI startups, big bets on those two industries, said Samuel Hammond, an economist with the right-leaning think tank Foundation for American Innovation.
“Whether that bet pays off depends entirely on the policy of the U.S. government," Hammond told NPR.
Andreessen, who has historically supported Democrats, said the “final straw” with his shift away from Biden was the president’s policy aimed at the super rich: a 25% tax on unrealized gains on households that are worth more than $100 million.
That kind of levy on the wealthiest Americans “makes start-ups completely implausible,” Andreessen claimed on the podcast. “Venture capital just ends. Firms like ours just don’t exist.”
The remarks underscore a fusing of the right-wing flank of Silicon Valley and Trump's populist movement.
“If there’s any unifying ideology to the rising right in Silicon Valley it’s a sense that the system is broken and also the parallel sense that they can build a better system," Hammond said.
Tech billionaires endorsing Trump and Vance as way to rail against perceived ‘wokeism’
While many of the tech moguls supporting Trump and Vance tout policy positions that favor Silicon Valley, another element is that the tech elite are now embracing the GOP ticket as being on the side of a rebellion against liberals.
Whether it is railing against diversity, equity and inclusion rules, or policies supporting transgender youth, Musk, Sacks and others in the tech elite used X to go on the offensive on culture war issues.
In Vance, not only do they have someone who has called “the DEI agenda a destructive ideology,” but a person who wants to fight the culture war with a background in venture capital.
“Many of these guys who previously identified as libertarian are now sort of re-imagining themselves, or pivoting themselves, to a kind of right-wing populism, to Trumpism. And Vance is a really great example of that,” said Max Chafkin, who wrote “The Contrarian: Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley’s Pursuit of Power,” which discusses Vance.
“J.D. Vance is seen as one of theirs,” Chafkin added. “He also has policy positions that can be perceived as being friendly to tech,” he said. “But I think that is secondary to the identity piece of this.”
Adds economist Hammond: "To them, there is government by managers, by a woke DEI office," he said. "Or government by entrepreneurs."
Not all of Silicon Valley is behind MAGA, but support is growing in venture capital world
Large swaths of the tech world are still very much deeply liberal. Rank-and-file tech workers at big companies and smaller startups tend to favor Democrats and their donations typically support left-leaning causes.
The Information, a technology news site popular in Silicon Valley, conducted a reader survey this week and found that nearly 60% of respondents plan to vote for President Biden in November.
Yet when it comes to tech financiers and their elite friends, it is another story, said author Chafkin.
“It’s tempting to paint this with a broad brush and say all of Silicon Valley is getting behind the former president, but what’s actually happening is that Silicon Valley’s right wing has been activated and persuaded to open their pockets,” he said.
Executives of the biggest companies, like Apple, Nvidia, Meta, Microsoft, Amazon and Google have not endorsed any candidate, keeping with the tradition of Big Tech leadership staying on the sidelines of presidential elections.
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