Trump gets $1 million from Silicon Valley donor who once gave to Democrats

Today Helberg’s previously unreported $1 million donation to the Trump campaign shoots him into the upper echelon of the former president’s donors at a time when Donald Trump’s campaign trails President Biden’s in the money chase. Helberg is part of a small but influential cohort of tech leaders that have decided to back the former president — despite their own waffling and the industry’s broader hostility toward Trump.

In Silicon Valley, “the social cost of supporting Trump isn’t as great as it was,” Helberg said of his decision to switch parties. That was because “Trump was right on a lot of make-or-break issues for America.”

The bulk of Helberg’s contribution — $844,600 — went to the Trump 47 joint fundraising committee. At least 20 donors had donated the maximum amount of more than $800,000 to the Trump 47 committee by the end of March, according to the most recent reports available from the Federal Election Commission. Trump has been urging more donors to join that elite circle as he has appeared at several high-profile fundraisers over the past month-and-a-half. Helberg is the only publicly known maxed-out donor who hails from the tech world.

Trump has stepped up his fundraising efforts as his political committees strain to cover the mounting costs of his own legal bills while covering those of some of his associates. FEC reports show Biden and the Democrats posting a huge cash advantage over Trump.

At a recent private luncheon at his Mar-a-Lago Club attended by donors who gave $40,000 or more, Trump told the crowd: “Anyone who makes a $1 million donation right now to the Republican Party … I will let you come up and speak,” according to audio of his speech obtained by The Washington Post. Helberg says his donation was made just days before that.

While Trump as president sought to ban TikTok if its China-based parent company, ByteDance, did not sell it within 45 days, he has recently criticized a similar initiative Biden signed into law, appearing to put him at odds with Helberg. But Helberg and Trump hold similar anti-China positions that have helped them forge common ground.

Earlier this month, Helberg traveled to Mar-a-Lago, where he says he “fell in love” with Trump while mingling with a slate of GOP vice-presidential hopefuls, including Sen. J.D. Vance (Ohio), Rep. Elise Stefanik (N.Y.), Sens. Marco Rubio (Fla.) and Rick Scott (Fla.). He spent the better part of the other week in conversation with the former president about topics such as the risks of overregulating artificial intelligence and the importance of Silicon Valley playing a role in developing military technologies, he recalled.

Tech executive-turned-podcast influencer David Sacks, who, like Helberg, is a close associate of billionaire investor Peter Thiel, is another member of the Silicon Valley cohort who has moved toward the former president. (Helberg is married to Keith Rabois, a compatriot of Thiel since their undergraduate years at Stanford University and a former partner at Thiel’s venture capital firm, Founders Fund.) Sacks initially backed Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) — helping launch his campaign on X — and then hosted fundraisers for Republican Vivek Ramaswamy and now-independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Now, Sacks is organizing a Trump fundraiser of his own, and he hosted the likes of Elon Musk, Thiel and Rupert Murdoch at his Hollywood Hills home in April for a dinner party focused on airing anti-Biden grievances, according to four people familiar with his activities, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe them. The Sacks fundraiser and party were first reported by Puck.

Sacks has complimented Trump on X. And he might be joined in his fundraising efforts by Chamath Palihapitiya, a former Facebook executive who co-hosts the “All-In” podcast with Sacks and has historically backed Democrats, one of the people said. Palihapitiya did not respond to a request for comment. Sacks declined to comment. Rabois told The Post last year that Trump was a “sociopath” and that he would not vote for him, but declined to comment on his current position beyond saying he was not supporting Biden.

Over the past year, the political mood among the donor class in Silicon Valley — and across the industry at large — has been one of disgust at both choices in the 2024 election. The tech industry skews young; Biden is viewed by many as too old and his policies are seen as unfriendly to the sector’s interests.

Even among some liberals in Silicon Valley, Biden is so unpopular that earlier this year, a group of Democratic tech leaders with ties to OpenAI CEO Sam Altman raised millions to back long-shot Biden primary challenger Rep. Dean Phillips (D-Minn.). Kennedy and his running mate, Nicole Shanahan, who was married to Google co-founder Sergey Brin, have also piqued the interest of Silicon Valley leaders who are frustrated by their other options.

Trump is making a bit of a comeback after he lost some key donor support. Some Silicon Valley Republicans and moderates have now decided that he is the lesser of two evils. People in Silicon Valley who have decided to back Trump say they expected a moderate in Biden but instead got what they see as a radical administration that intends to aggressively regulate artificial intelligence and raise the capital gains tax to its highest level ever. (Biden campaigned on raising taxes on the wealthiest Americans.)

They also chafed at Biden’s appointment of antitrust advocate Lina Khan, whose Federal Trade Commission has sought to block mergers and rein in Big Tech companies. More recently, Biden’s decision to pause some military aid to Israel has tipped some people over the edge, Helberg and others said.

Biden “has proved himself to be the most woke president we’ve ever had,” despite pitching himself as a centrist, Helberg said.

Biden’s campaign noted that the president just completed a Silicon Valley fundraising swing over the weekend, where he was hosted by Vinod Khosla, Brad Smith and Marissa Mayer. The events in and around San Francisco and Seattle raised $10 million, according to the campaign.

Helberg said that the negative stigma that once surrounded those who backed Trump in Silicon Valley had softened considerably compared with four years ago. He noted that Trump’s decision to escalate hostilities with China was an outlier at the start of his administration but has now become more of a consensus in both parties.

In addition to his advisory role at Palantir, Helberg runs the Hill and Valley Forum, an informal defense technology group that was critical in pushing Congress to pass divest-or-ban legislation targeting the popular social media app TikTok. In April, Biden signed the law that gave ByteDance up to a year to sell the app or face a nationwide ban.

Helberg — who has called TikTok a Chinese “weapon of war” and says he has raised roughly $2 million for Democrats over the years — said he appreciated Biden’s support of the bill, which he praised as a bipartisan moment. But he noted that Trump was an early opponent of TikTok dating to 2020, when his administration tried to force ByteDance to sell the service to a U.S. company.

Helberg also said that as a gay man, the GOP’s stances on LGBTQ+ issues — which includes a law in his home state of Florida limiting what teachers can say about gender and sexual orientation — didn’t trouble him. He says he believes that the party is becoming less socially conservative on the federal level, but is a mixed bag in the states.

Still, Trump not has not regained all of his Silicon Valley supporters. Billionaire venture capitalist Doug Leone said he could no longer support him after the Jan. 6, 2021, attack at the U.S. Capitol by a pro-Trump mob — though, in January, before the GOP nominating contest was over, he donated $250,000 to the Republican National Committee.

Money donated to the Trump 47 committee flows sequentially to the Trump campaign; the Save America political action committee that he has used to pay some of his legal bills; the Republican National Committee; and several dozen state Republican committees in the country. Helberg gave the rest of his $1 million donation to the MAGA Inc. super PAC.

Ashley Parker contributed to this report.