Silicon Valley warms up to Donald Trump

Vocal tech and crypto leaders are increasingly coming out in support of another Trump presidency — felonies be damned.

by Alex Heath

Jun 7, 2024, 11:51 PM UTC

David Sacks.

Getty Images / The Verge

Alex Heath is a contributing writer and author of the Sources newsletter.

Ryan Selkis worried about his physical safety as he pulled up to David Sacks’ fundraiser for Donald Trump in San Francisco on Thursday night.

Even with the heavy security around the perimeter of Sacks’ “Broadcliff” estate, Selkis, who runs the crypto research platform Messari, expected to encounter swarms of agitated protestors. Instead, he was greeted with an overwhelming show of support for Trump. “It was a 10-to-1 pro-Trump versus anti-Trump [crowd],” he told me the following morning. “People were cheering the cars going in.”

Thursday’s sold-out fundraiser, which was co-hosted by Sacks and his All-In Podcast pal, Chamath Palihapitiya, marked Trump’s first official visit to San Francisco in over a decade, according to The New York Times. More importantly, it signals how vocal leaders of the tech world are increasingly coming out in support of another Trump presidency. Despite attempting to overthrow the last election, getting impeached twice, and more recently, becoming a convicted felon, Trump appears to be fracturing what has historically been an extremely progressive monoculture in Silicon Valley.

During our conversation, Selkis declined to give names of others in attendance at Sacks’ home on the “Billionaires Row” street of the Pacific Heights neighborhood, though he confirmed that there was a particularly strong showing from the world of crypto. “The entire industry maps pretty well to his existing political philosophy,” said Selkis, who also attended a recent Trump fundraiser at Mar-a-Lago. “I think he recognizes that keeping innovation here is going be good for both job creation and tech dominance.”

To be sure, there’s naked self-interest in crypto leaders like Selkis cozying up to Trump. The Biden administration has been anything but friendly to crypto. The hawkishness from political leaders like Elizabeth Warren is an “an own-goal that is driving progressives in crypto absolutely mad right now,” according to Selkis. Trump, by contrast, has recently made crypto more a part of his campaign. In May, he said he would pardon Silk Road founder Ross Ulbricht if elected.

The push to influence Trump’s sudden openness to crypto was on full display at Thursday’s fundraiser. Selkis recalled to me one exchange about AI deepfakes, during which someone in the audience suggested that blockchain technology could be used to authenticate media with unique, digital signatures. Trump liked the idea and joked that it was better than the solution he had heard from Elon Musk.

There’s always been a small but powerful contingent of Silicon Valley that supports Trump. What’s seemingly changed is that more of his supporters like Selkis — who said he hasn’t voted for Trump before — feel increasingly emboldened to speak out.

“He was in top form in terms of [being] entertaining plus [having] the balance of substance,” Selkis said of Trump. “You can’t get much more night and day than watching President Trump work a room and give remarks than whatever is happening in the White House right now. It’s about as stark a contrast as you can imagine.”

According to Selkis, Trump’s overall message to the crowd on Thursday was: “We all know that this administration is out of control with the red tape. We want innovation to flourish here, and if that’s what you want, I’m your guy.” It’s a simple, conservative pitch designed to resonate with a room where entry cost a minimum of $50,000.

The fundraiser being a stone’s throw from where the Democratic establishment has hosted many fundraisers for years is striking. The takeaway for Selkis is that Trump went “right into the belly of the beast and still had a massively successful fundraiser.”

He now expects more tech leaders to voice their support of Trump in the weeks and months ahead. “I think it’s probably healthy for Silicon Valley to have that monoculture broken down a bit,” he told me. “I think that’s really what this event tapped into.”

Notebook

My notes on what else is happening right now:

Nvidia on the mountaintop: There’s a direct throughline from Nvidia surpassing Apple’s valuation this week to CEO Jensen Huang autographing a woman’s chest at a tech conference. It’s hard to know when Nvidia has truly reached its peak, though it feels like the events of this week signal that the hype is nearing a crescendo. I found this stat from Bloomberg fascinating ahead of WWDC next week: “The last time Nvidia was worth more than Apple was in 2002, five years before the first iPhone was released. At the time, both companies were worth less than $10 billion each.”
Humane can’t catch a break: The last thing you want to happen when you’re in the process of trying to sell your hardware company is to essentially recall your charging case. That’s what Humane did this week as reports swirled that it may be selling to HP. This excellent deep dive into the company’s troubles mentions that Humane hoped to sell 100,000 of its AI pins and has sold less than 10,000 — numbers I can independently confirm. As I’ve said before, the story of Humane has many parallels to Magic Leap, which was also blinded by hubris and ended up shipping a product that no one actually wanted. I wonder what Sam Altman thinks of this whole debacle considering that, like Reddit, he apparently owns more of Humane than its co-founders.

People moves

Some notable career moves and job rumors:

I’m hearing that OpenAI may be quietly on the hunt for a new head of product. Ping me if you know more…
TikTok is looking for someone senior to beef up its direct messaging to more directly take on Instagram DMs and Snapchat, I’m told. The initiative is early and could take the shape of a standalone app.
Google has found its next CFO in Anat Ashkenazi, formerly of Eli Lilly. She starts at the end of July.
ByteDance’s new general counsel is John Rogovin, formerly of Warner Bros. Discovery. I noticed the mention of his past experience at the Department of Justice in the press release — experience that will likely come in handy for the company’s legal challenge to keep TikTok running in the US.
Joe Benarroch, who has been acting as X CEO Linda Yaccarino’s de facto chief of staff and the company’s only liaison with the press, AKA sender of the poop emoji, has left without explanation.
Keith Enright, Google’s longtime chief privacy officer, is leaving amid a restructuring that makes it sound like his role won’t be replaced.
Tech CEO PR whisperer extraordinaire Lulu Cheng Meservey joined Shopify’s board of directors alongside Uber CFO Prashanth Mahendra-Rajah.

Interesting links

Reid Hoffman’s op-ed countering the growing support in tech for Donald Trump.
What could go wrong: Zoom founder Eric Yuan wants to have AIs attend virtual meetings on your behalf.
Our deep dive on Rivian’s latest updates with CEO RJ Scaringe.
Our look at the first free alternative iOS App Store in Europe.
Research on when and how we’ll run out of human-made data to train LLMs.
Weekend reading before WWDC: “How Apple fell behind in the AI arms race.”

If you aren’t already subscribed to Command Line, don’t forget to sign up and get future issues delivered directly to your inbox. You’ll also get full access to the archive featuring scoops and interviews with leaders from companies like Meta, Google, OpenAI, and more.

As always, I want to hear from you, especially if you have a juicy tip or feedback. Respond to this email, and I’ll get back to you, or ping me securely on Signal. I’m happy to keep you anonymous.

Thanks for subscribing.

Follow topics and authors from this story to see more like this in your personalized homepage feed and to receive email updates.