- Bill Gates said he was surprised to see how many tech billionaires support President Donald Trump. The billionaire Microsoft founder donated $50 million to the Kamala Harris campaign and said he “always thought of Silicon Valley as being left of center.”
It seems like lately billionaires are banding together—and behind President Donald Trump. But one executive isn’t in on the boys’ club throwing money and support behind the president.
Microsoft founder Bill Gates was one of very few executives to openly support former Vice President Kamala Harris and her fight for a Democratic win on Election Day. The billionaire donated $50 million to the Harris campaign because “this election is different.”
Gates has notoriously flown under the radar with politics, and didn’t have much to say about his Harris donation. While he didn’t get the outcome he wanted, he says he was nonetheless shocked to see his fellow tech billionaires throw their support behind Trump.
“I always thought of Silicon Valley as being left of center,” Gates told the New York Times in an interview published Thursday. “The fact that now there is a significant right-of-center group is a surprise to me.”
That assumption was true—at least some years ago. In 2017, Stanford Graduate School of Business released findings from a study of 600 tech company founders, which showed the group was largely supportive of Democrats and redistribution through higher taxation.
“Although it is not surprising to find that individual wealthy liberals exist, our results suggest that elites in this industry as a whole appear poised to be advocates for economic, social, and global equality in many domains,” the authors of Wealthy Elites’ Policy Preferences and Economic Inequality: The Case of Technology Entrepreneurs wrote.
Meanwhile, think tank Brookings Institute had actually started chipping away at the assumption most tech executives were Democrats. Gregory Ferenstein, a political researcher, wrote in a 2017 article for the Brookings Institute there’s an argument that tech executives have “no underlying ideological belief system, but just ad hoc optimize for more money and power.”
The past few months have proven wrong the notion that most tech executives are liberal. Some of the most high-profile and wealthiest tech executives went out of their way not only to publicly support Trump, but donate millions to his inauguration.
The most prime example is Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who has essentially become Trump’s right-hand man. Musk, the richest man in the world with a $430 billion net worth, regularly campaigned for Trump and donated more than $200 million to help elect him.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has also worked to thaw his once-frosty relationship with Trump, having donated $1 million to his inaugural fund and cohosted an inauguration reception with other Republican billionaires. The two even dined together at Mar-a-Lago the night before Thanksgiving. That was quite the 180 for their relationship, considering Trump had previously threatened to jail Zuckerberg “for life” if the tech executive interfered in the election. Zuckerberg infamously announced in early January that Meta would ditch fact-checking in favor of community notes, similar to X’s content moderation policy.
“The recent elections also feel like a cultural tipping point towards, once again, prioritizing speech,” Zuckerberg said in a video announcing the change. “So we’re going to get back to our roots and focus on reducing mistakes, simplifying our policies and restoring free expression on our platforms.”
Gates, who’s worth $165 billion, said while “incredible things happened because of sharing information on the internet,” social media has had major downfalls.
“You see ills that I have to say I did not predict,” Gates told the NYT, citing increased political divisiveness online.
Aside from social media executives, Trump has garnered support from other tech CEOs—as is evident in who attended his inauguration this year. Aside from Zuckerberg and Musk, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Google CEO Sundar Pichai, and Apple CEO Tim Cook all attended Trump’s inauguration event. TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew was also there.
While Gates is by no means an open Trump supporter, he said he’d do his best to work with the president.
“I will engage this administration just like I did the first Trump administration as best I can,” Gates told the NYT.