Tech heavyweights who helped ignite Trump’s candidacy have told close associates they feel alienated from the GOP and are casting about for a candidate who more closely aligns with their extreme pro-business agenda.
Non-paywall: https://archive.ph/LLAMY
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A year ago, the Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel received a pitch from a longtime associate, the right-wing pundit Ann Coulter, encouraging him to throw his weight behind Florida Gov.
Once enticed by the prospect that Trump would usher in a new, ultra-capitalist era in Republican politics, members of the right-leaning tech elite are now looking for allies to protect the industry from bruising attacks by both parties and champion its worth as the country’s most dynamic economic engine.
The venture capitalist Doug Leone — whose net worth is a reported $6.8 billion thanks to early bets on Apple, PayPal, Google, and WhatsApp — donated more than $200,000 to Trump and Trump-associated committees through 2019, and he sat on the former president’s post-pandemic economic recovery task force.
Oracle co-founder and executive chairman Larry Ellison lent Trump his Southern California property for a fundraiser ahead of the 2020 primaries, eventually launching a public-private partnership with the White House to combat the coronavirus.
People who know Leone, a longtime Republican, said his support of Trump was tied to a belief that the former New York businessman would cut bureaucratic red tape and attack entrenched industries that blocked entrants from Silicon Valley.
Friends and advisers to Silicon Valley donors say that the underlying alienation from politics stems from what people perceive as Washington’s failure to serve the tech industry — a feeling that has only accelerated during the Trump and Biden years.
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