U.S. election season is in full swing, and “with a blizzard of tweets, blog posts, public comments, and podcasts, the tech industry’s most powerful business leaders are delivering a running commentary on this year’s presidential campaign cycle that’s hard to tune out,” Alexei Oreskovic writes in Fortune magazine this month.
If it’s hard for regular voters to tune it out, it’s perhaps even harder for politicians themselves to ignore when, as Oreskovic (Fortune’s tech editor) writes, “enormous political contributions from Silicon Valley have meant that Washington is increasingly beholden to these outspoken techies.”
We’ve dug into Federal Election Commission (FEC) records going back to 2020 to quantify those enormous political contributions. As in many industries, Big Tech’s leaders tend to spread their donations across the political spectrum, so we have looked at each person’s giving as a whole to determine their political lean.
The charts below visualize the political donations of Silicon Valley’s most prominent figures to political parties, candidates, and PACs this election cycle, color-coded according to whether their overall giving leans Republican (red) or Democratic (blue). The circle sizes correspond to the amounts donated. They are based on FEC data as of Sept. 20, 2024, and they only include individual donations. (Individual donations do not include political donations made via companies, nonprofits, or so-called dark money groups, which can be substantial, as recent reporting from the Wall Street Journal on the political donations of Elon Musk shows.)
The PayPal Mafia
The PayPal mafia, a term coined in a 2007 Fortune cover story, refers to a group of fintech innovators who launched the payments startup PayPal in 1998. These men (and they were all men) went on to become some of the most influential figures in Silicon Valley. Other tech “mafias” have followed in their footsteps, but the PayPal mafia—which is the subject of an upcoming movie—includes the richest person in the world, Elon Musk of Tesla, SpaceX, and X fame; the venture capitalist Peter Thiel; Reid Hoffman, who cofounded LinkedIn and was a founding investor in OpenAI; Keith Rabois of Khosla Ventures; and David Sacks, an entrepreneur and investor, and cohost of the popular All-In podcast.
The Crypto Bros
Investors in and advocates of cryptocurrency are also diving into the political arena. Several prominent figures in the movement lean conservative, pushing back against Biden administration Bitcoin regulations and expressing concerns over whether more aggressive regulation lies ahead.
Women of Silicon Valley
In an industry that’s notoriously male-dominated, some of the super-wealthy women applying their fortunes to political influence lean to the left.
Facebook Connections
Each of these political power brokers has ties to Mark Zuckerberg’s social media platform or his company, Meta. Dustin Moskovitz, a Facebook cofounder turned Asana CEO, has been a prominent supporter of Democratic causes; as has Sheryl Sandberg, the company’s former chief operating officer. Meanwhile Palmer Luckey, creator of the Oculus virtual-reality headset, and the Winklevoss twins, who accused Zuckerberg of copying their idea for the website back at Harvard in 2004, have shelled out for Republicans. Zuckerberg himself is notably absent as an individual donor, since he has funneled his giving through Facebook’s roughly nonpartisan PAC over the past four years, rather than give directly to political candidates.
Big VCs
The biggest names in tech investing are pouring their money into politics, too. A16z founders Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz lead the way with a conservative lean, followed by dueling interests at Sequoia Capital and Khosla Ventures.
The Whole Valley
For a fuller picture of Big Tech’s political giving, we’ve gathered dozens of big names in Silicon Valley and where they’re putting their millions in the chart below. Hoffman and Moskovitz have the biggest presence, giving more than $55 million each to Democrats over the past four years. They’re followed by a handful of conservative VCs: Thiel, Andreessen, and Horowitz.
This story was updated on Oct. 3 to reflect relevant reporting by another news outlet.
