How much money did the tech industry spend on the US presidential election?
Put another way: how much influence did the tech industry tried to buy? My colleagues Lauren Aratani and Raphael Hernandes report:
Silicon Valley poured more than $230m into the US presidential election this year, according to a Guardian analysis, the bulk of which comes from a massive $118m donation Elon Musk made to Donald Trump’s campaign.
Advocates of cryptocurrency were particularly active in this election as they fought to stave off regulation, pumping money into the presidential campaigns as well as key congressional races.
Trump overall received $133m in donations from some of tech’s biggest names, including:
$118m from Elon Musk, owner of Tesla, SpaceX and X (formerly Twitter) who has an estimated net worth of $350bn.
$5m from Marc Andreessen, the billionaire founder of venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, also known as a16z. Andreessen’s co-founder, Ben Horowitz, initially supported Trump but flipped to Harris.
$5m from Jan Koum, the founder of WhatsApp who made the bulk of his fortune when Facebook acquired the messaging app in 2014 for $19bn.
Harris received a total of $71m, including:
$39m from Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz, who left the social media company in 2008 to start workflow software company Asana.
$17m from Reid Hoffman, the cofounder of LinkedIn.
$11m from Chris Larsen, the billionaire chair of Ripple, a cryptocurrency company.
Trump is already a boon for crypto. Bitcoin has hit $100,000. He’s appointed David Sacks, a former PayPal executive, confidant of Musk and Trump’s own biggest booster in Silicon Valley, to a new role as White House czar of crypto and AI. He’s nominated Paul Atkins, a former member of the Securities and Exchange Commission and an avid crypto proponent, to chair the SEC. It’s not a stretch to imagine Atkins will visit less government scrutiny on the industry than his predecessor, the crypto critic Gary Gensler. It seems crypto’s campaign donations have already netted the industry significant gains, whether or not the contributions went to the president-elect.
Source: The Guardian
