Silicon Valley Donors Bailed on Biden. Kamala Harris Is Winning Them Back

Hours after President Joe Biden announced that he would be dropping out of the 2024 presidential race, Democratic megadonors in Silicon Valley were already lining up to support Vice President Kamala Harris at the top of their party’s ticket.

“This is what’s right for our country–and our democratic future,” wrote Reid Hoffman, the cofounder and executive chairman of Linkedin and the founder of Greylock Ventures, on X. Last week, Hoffman had endorsed a call between 300 democratic donors and Harris and encouraged members of his network to join the call, according to The New York Times.

“Kamala Harris is the American dream personified, daughter of immigrants who met at Cal. She is also toughness personified, rising from my home town of Oakland California to become the top prosecutor of the state,” Dmitri Mehlhorn, Hoffman’s former political advisor, tells WIRED. “With Scranton Joe stepping back, I cannot wait to help elect President Harris.”

Aaron Levie, the chief executive of multi-billion cloud storage company Box, and a Democratic donor who hosted a fundraiser for Hillary Clinton in 2015, quote-tweeted Biden’s resignation letter and said, “Wow. Amazing leadership. Now let’s go!”

These calls for support are a major turn of events since Biden’s disastrous debate performance last month sent donors reeling over his chances of winning reelection. As pressure mounted on Biden to withdraw, Hoffman told WIRED earlier this month that like-minded SIlicon Valley megadonors were holding off on making any further donations. “It’s definitely caused a bunch of turmoil,” he said at the time.

“Both donors and rank-and-file Democrats were kind of worried before the debate, but in the weeks since then his candidacy has become nearly impossible. The gap went from surmountable to seemingly insurmountable,” Manny Yekutiel, a San Francisco-based Democratic organizer who once served as the Northern California Deputy Finance Director for Hillary Clinton, tells WIRED. “This now opens the floodgates for much more enthusiasm, for the election, the ticket, and the convention. It will make it a lot easier to organize.”

Already, donations appear to be pouring in. Harris’ presidential campaign raised more than $27.5 million in small-dollar donations over the first few hours after announcing she would seek the nomination, ActBlue wrote in a Sunday post on X.

“This does open the floodgates,” said one top tech executive, who has worked on multi-billion dollar software products in Silicon Valley and requested anonymity on account of not wanting to be seen as representative of her current or past companies.

“Fundraising for Biden really dropped off a cliff, to the point that bundlers switched to bundling for Congressional campaigns because there wasn’t much coming in from big dollar donors for Biden. I’m guessing we’ll now see a gangbusters fundraising day when the numbers come out tomorrow,” she told WIRED on Sunday.

As donations from the left reportedly dried up in recent weeks, Silicon Valley leaders like Elon Musk, venture capitalist David Sacks, and the founders of the prestige venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz came out in support of former president Donald Trump and his vice presidential pick JD Vance after the assassination attempt last week, pledging millions of dollars. Though people like Sacks and Musk have said that the tech industry was growing more comfortable with reelecting the former president, there is still little evidence to suggest a seismic shift in Silicon Valley’s political leanings.