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, cofounder and executive chair of LinkedIn and partner at Greylock Partners, 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 hometown of Oakland, California, to become the top prosecutor of the state,” Dmitri Mehlhorn, Hoffman’s former political adviser, tells WIRED. “With Scranton Joe stepping back, I cannot wait to help elect President Harris.”
Aaron Levie, the chief executive of multibillion-dollar cloud storage company Box and a Democratic donor who hosted a fundraiser for Hillary Clinton in 2015, reposted Biden’s resignation letter on X and said, “Wow. Amazing leadership. Now let’s go!”
“The tech community must come together to defeat Donald Trump and save our democracy by uniting behind Vice President Kamala Harris as the Democratic nominee for President,” Ron Conway, the founder and managing partner of SV Angel, tells WIRED. “I have known Kamala for decades, and she’s been a fighter, a leader, and an advocate for the tech ecosystem since the day we met. She is the best choice to defeat Donald Trump and she has my unwavering support.”
These calls for support constitute 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 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 multibillion-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.
