More Than 100 Silicon Valley Investors Pledge to Support Kamala Harris
The New York Times
The group, including Democratic donors such as Reid Hoffman and Vinod Khosla, has been organized under an effort called VCsForKamala.
More than 100 venture capitalists said on Wednesday that they had pledged to vote for Vice President Kamala Harris in November and had solicited donations for her presidential campaign, in a rejoinder to the splintering among tech leaders over whom to support in the election.
The group includes Reid Hoffman, a founder of LinkedIn; Vinod Khosla of Khosla Ventures; Mark Cuban, the former principal owner of the Dallas Mavericks; Ron Conway, a well-known angel investor; and the billionaire Chris Sacca.
“We are pro-business, pro-American dream, pro-entrepreneurship and pro-technological progress,” the group said in a statement posted to their website, VCsForKamala.org. “We also believe in democracy as the backbone of our nation.” The website asks people to sign a pledge to support Ms. Harris and another to donate to her campaign.
The effort was buttressed by another group of tech entrepreneurs and workers called Tech For Kamala, which also wrote a letter this week expressing “enthusiastic and unwavering support for Vice President Harris.” The letter gathered more than 550 signatures in two days.
The moves are perhaps the most public pushback to right-wing venture capitalists and executives whom some tech leaders see as dominating political conversation in the tech community. For years, Silicon Valley was largely considered a liberal bastion. But over the past few weeks, Elon Musk, who leads Tesla, SpaceX and X, and the investors Marc Andreessen, Ben Horowitz and David Sacks have endorsed former President Donald J. Trump, the Republican nominee.
While these conservatives — such as Mr. Musk, who created a new pro-Trump super PAC, and Mr. Sacks, who spoke at the Republican National Convention — never represented a majority of the rank-and-file employees in the tech industry, the right is ascendant in Silicon Valley in a way that it had not been in over a decade.
