Since the start of the campaign for the presidential election in the United States, Silicon Valley Democrats had kept a low profile. San Francisco was abuzz with rumors about increasingly open support for Donald Trump. In the wake of the attack on the former president on July 13, Elon Musk formally gave his support to the Republican candidate. Two major investors, Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, followed him, breaking with their Democratic allies.
The passing of the torch from the octogenarian president to Kamala Harris has changed the situation. “There is a real change in dynamics in Silicon Valley,” said Aaron Levie, CEO of cloud software company Box, two days after Joe Biden announced his withdrawal from the race. The vice president’s candidacy will allow a ” RELAUNCH “ relations between the Valley and the Democratic Party, he hoped.
Businesspeople who had shunned the outgoing president’s campaign have rallied behind Kamala Harris. ” With all my heart “, tweeted LinkedIn’s Reid Hoffman within minutes of Joe Biden’s announcement. Kamala Harris is “much more pro-business than Trump”, he explained on CNN. Ron Conway, another influential investor, followed, voicing support “infallible” to the vice president.
Netflix co-founder Reed Hastings, who three weeks ago said Joe Biden would be better off withdrawing his candidacy, has donated $7 million (€6.5 million) to the former California senator’s political action committee. She can also count on the support of Salesforce founder Marc Benioff and a number of women at the head of philanthropic foundations such as Sheryl Sandberg, Laurene Powell Jobs and Melinda French Gates. Sam Altman of OpenAI had financially supported her during the primary campaign for the Democratic nomination in 2020.
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The relief is all the greater because Kamala Harris is well-known in Silicon Valley. She trained as a prosecutor in San Francisco between 2004 and 2010, at the beginning of the start-up boom. She still has many friends there. Her brother-in-law, Tony West, the former deputy attorney general under Barack Obama, has been Uber’s general counsel since 2017.
Entrepreneurs hope she will be more receptive to their arguments than the current president, who, unlike Barack Obama, has maintained his distance from tech bosses. “If she presented a ten-point plan for business, technology and entrepreneurship, and it was credible, she could very quickly rally a significant part of the ecosystem.”said Aaron Levie, known for his Democratic sympathies, in an interview with Politico.
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