Silicon Valley investors haven’t been shy about criticizing presumed Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump. Earlier this week Marc Andreessen, who typically supports Republican candidates, said at a Bloomberg technology conference in San Francisco that he would vote for presumed Democrat nominee Hillary Clinton because he disagreed with many of Trump’s positions including his idea to curtail immigration.
On Thursday, another well-known investor, Sequoia Capital partner Michael Moritz, made his case against Trump by calling him a “loser” in an op-ed in the Financial Times.
“He is, at least by Silicon Valley standards, and to use an epithet Mr. Trump so readily lets loose on anyone that arouses his ire, “a loser” — both for what he stands for and because of his business performance.”
Moritz, an early investor in Google and PayPal, compared Trump’s business acumen and financial returns with those of Warren Buffet, Michael Bloomberg, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and Related Companies’ CEO and founder Michael Ross. Moritz said that Trump’s business talent is vastly overstated because he could have been equally wealthy—he estimates Trump’s personal fortune at around $4.5 billion versus Trump’s self-proclaimed $10 billion —by merely investing his inheritance from years ago in an index fund that tracked the S&P 500.
“Compared with Mr. Bloomberg and Mr. Ross, Mr. Trump seems little more than a hustler who takes from the rich (lenders he has short-changed, partners he has sued) and also takes from the poor (hapless students of Trump University, tenants whom he has allegedly bullied),” said Moritz.
Similar to Andreessen, Moritz also disagreed with Trump’s anti-immigration rhetoric by countering that many of Silicon Valley’s most talented entrepreneurs were immigrants, including Google’s Sergey Brin, WhatsApp’s Jan Koum, and Intel’s Andy Grove.
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“The women and men of Silicon Valley welcome open borders,” he wrote. “They are not nationalists who stir up dark memories of purges, pogroms, the 1930s, Latin-American strongmen or central African dictators. They run their companies eager to recruit the very best — whether they were born in Guadalajara or Chengdu, Hyderabad or Budapest; whether or not they worship in mosques.”
Moritz and Andreessen aren’t the only venture capitalists to get on the anti-Trump bandwagon. Marc Cuban, the billionaire former tech entrepreneur who now appears on ABC’s startup show Shark Tank, also dismissed Trump, saying he would have “have to grovel” for campaign cash, adding that the presumptive GOP candidate will tell prospective donors “what they want to hear.”
