August 12, 2020

Tech Zillionaires Love Kamala Harris

Stefani Reynolds/CNP via ZUMA

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Theodore Schleifer says that the tech community will be happy with Joe Biden’s choice of Kamala Harris as his running mate:

Cooper Teboe, a top Democratic fundraiser in Silicon Valley, said about one-third of major West Coast donors that he’s spoken to have been waiting to see who Biden would choose as vice president before deciding whether to invest tens of thousands of dollars into Democrats this cycle. Should Biden have chosen Warren, for instance, tech donors might’ve had concerns.

“She is the safest pick for the donor community,” Teboe said of Harris. “She will be the pick that the California, Silicon Valley donor community — who are worried about things like tech and repatriation and taxes and so on and so forth — she is the pick that they will be happiest with.”

Seriously? A full third of these geniuses were holding off because they first wanted to know who Biden’s VP would be? Don’t they know that veeps have no real influence on policy at all? It’s hardly a big secret.

This just confirms the general sense I’ve always gotten that Silicon Valley folks are surprisingly ignorant of even the basics of politics. It’s easy to make some snarky point about this and then move on, but it’s genuinely kind of mysterious. I suppose they so desperately wish politics didn’t exist that they just wall themselves off from it.

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Related: Billionaires Have Made an Absolute Killing During the Pandemic. The Number Is Staggering.

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We just wrapped up a shorter-than-normal, urgent-as-ever fundraising drive and we came up about $45,000 short of our $300,000 goal.

That means we're going to have upwards of $350,000, maybe more, to raise in online donations between now and June 30, when our fiscal year ends and we have to get to break-even. And even though there's zero cushion to miss the mark, we won't be all that in your face about our fundraising again until June.

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