Former President Donald Trump managed to raise $12 million on Thursday night alone. While the figure pales in comparison to his post-conviction rolls that have reached $200 million, the sum is noteworthy for one key reason:
He raised him in San Francisco.
The overwhelmingly liberal city has been a bastion of Democratic politics for decades and is represented by former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi. However, the fundraising comes not from the city's average citizens, but from big-dollar donors with ties to Silicon Valley.
In 2024, burglaries increased 44% in 2024 in San Francisco's more residential Taraval Police District. The New York Post reported Burglaries are also up 19% in Ingleside and 6.2% in the Richmond neighborhood. San Francisco has not had a Republican mayor since 1964, when he was the 34th mayor of San Francisco starting in 1956.
Located in the Bay Area, the valley is home to many technology and venture capital companies. In recent weeks, many of its heavyweights, albeit for different reasons, have thrown their support behind the former president.
“In 2016, the number of Silicon Valley people I met who supported Trump was a sample of one, which was Peter. [Thiel]”, former Palantir advisor Jacob Helburg told Reuters. “I count them by the dozens today, if not more than that. Over the last six months, we've started to see the dam break.”
Thiel made history in 2016 as the first openly gay man to address the Republican National Convention.
David Sacks
Thursday evening's $12 million fundraiser took place at the home of venture capitalist David Sacks, who hosted the event with fellow venture capitalist Chamath Palihapitiya.
A Trump campaign official said Just the news what “[t]the event organized by David Sacks and Chamath Paliphapitiya had over 100 attendees. It was attended by some of the top investors and innovators in the tech industry and raised $12 million.”
Sacks has been an outspoken critic of the Biden administration's handling of foreign policy, most notably the Ukraine war, and his analysis and calls for negotiations with Moscow have drawn considerable attention online.
sacks on thursday he explained his reasons for choosing to support Trump, highlighting the economy, foreign affairs, border security and “law” targeting the former president.
“With Biden, our options are limited to fighting the proxy war to the last Ukrainian or fighting Russia ourselves,” Sacks wrote. “President Trump has said that he wants the killing in Ukraine to stop and that he will try to end the war through a negotiated settlement. Ukraine will no longer be able to get the agreement that we talked about in April 2022, but still we can save Ukraine as an independent nation and avoid world war.”
Sacks also pointed to a myriad of economic metrics and insisted “[w]I can't afford four more years of Bidenomics.” He also accused Biden of enabling a “de facto open border policy” and insisted that the Biden administration had conducted “elective prosecutions of his political opponents.”
Shaun Maguire
Sequoia Capital partner Shaun Maguire made headlines last week in the wake of Trump's conviction in the case of Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg.
Trump was found guilty of 34 counts of falsifying business records in connection with a 2016 payment his then-lawyer Michael Cohen made to Stormy Daniels. Trump has it he promised to appeal conviction and maintains the case is part of a larger political witch hunt designed to derail his 2024 bid for the White House.
“I just gave President Trump $300,000. The timing is no coincidence.” Maguire published in X shortly after the verdict.
In a lengthy post explaining his decision, Maguire devoted a section to what he considered “the law,” stating that “[t]his has been another radicalizing experience. I understand that usually when there's smoke there's fire, but in this case I think when there's smoke there's law.”
He then vaguely outlined the concerns he had with Bragg's case, as well as the prosecutions brought by Special Counsel Jack Smith and Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis; and the civil demands of E. Jean Carroll and New York Attorney General Letitia James.
“Fairness is one of my guiding principles in life, and these cases have simply not been fair to Trump,” Maguire insisted.
In particular, Maguire's explanation for his support for Trump shared a key rationale with Sacks's, namely Trump's foreign policy.
“I think Trump was one of the best foreign policy presidents in decades, and during the most complex period in almost a century, as the East rises, which leads to a changing set of rules,” he said. insisted Among his key issues with the Biden administration's handling of the 2021 withdrawal from Afghanistan, Russia's invasion of Ukraine and the ongoing conflict between Israel and Hamas.
“For anyone who follows me on X, you know that I am a staunch supporter of Israel and also a Zionist. I believe that Israel is one of America's most important allies in the world,” he added. “Somehow the Biden administration has chosen to embrace Iran while alienating Saudi Arabia and Israel. This is an unforgivably disastrous policy in my view.”
Elon Musk
At the end of May, the Wall Street Journal reported that Trump had met with Tesla founder Elon Musk about a potential advisory role in a future Trump administration. Musk has denied any such discussion.
Fueling the speculation, however, has been Musk's political activity and previous policy decisions while leading the social media platform X. Musk, for example, ran for Florida GOP Gov. Launch of Ron DeSantis' presidential campaign in 2023, which occurred on the platform.
After buying Twitter, Musk dramatically overhauled the company's content moderation policies, reversing bans on prominent right-wing figures and eliminating censoring practices targeting COVID-19 cynicism and other positions. He beyond restored Trump's own accountthat the previous management had suspended following the incident of January 6.
While Musk has not endorsed Trump directly, he has made no secret of his disagreements with the Biden administration, particularly over the southern border situation, and has publicly engaged with other figures who support Trump.
In response to Sacks' post on Thursday, Musk himself responded with a succinct “reflective”. Like Sacks, Musk has also drawn scrutiny for his positions on the Ukraine war, which have been at odds with the Biden administration. In late March, for example, he asked for a “negotiated agreement” to the conflict, warning that if it persisted, Ukraine would lose more territory.
Musk has also appeared to confirm that X will soon host a town hall event with Trump. re-share an article announcing the event last week and saying “[t]yours will be interesting”.
Reasoning: direct interests
Among these three, foreign policy has emerged as a notable point of common criticism of the Biden administration. But other Silicon Valley heavyweights have identified policy positions more in line with their direct interests as motivating factors for supporting Trump as well.
Trevor Traina, a tech executive and former Trump ambassador to Austria, also pointed to the Biden administration's veto of legislation limiting the Securities and Exchange Commission's ability to regulate cryptocurrency as a key issue.
“This could have just been the final domino,” he told Reuters.
The Trump campaign has recently embraced cryptocurrency, announcing in late March that it would begin accepting cryptocurrency donations. Trump has also taken aim at Democratic-led efforts to advance state-backed digital currencies.
“This addition to President Trump's already ground-breaking digital fundraising operation marks the first time a major-party presidential candidate has embraced cryptocurrency for donations.” said the campaign at the time. “As our president, Donald J. Trump has reduced regulations and championed innovation in financial technology, while Democrats, like Biden and his official surrogate Elizabeth Warren, continue to believe that only government has the answers to how the our nation leads the world.”
Trump himself he attributed his appeal with technology leaders at their “high IQ”.
“These are bright guys, AI guys, these are the guys who are doing all the things you read about,” he told Fox News. “These are just a bunch of brilliant people. And they can't relate to Biden because he's a stupid person, and I have a high IQ.”
“They don't like dealing with an IQ that's like, you know, 1/3 of theirs, because it's a difficult thing when someone has an IQ of 180, it's difficult to deal with a man with an IQ IQ of 70 … or maybe lower … Biden is a very low IQ individual,” he added.
Ben Whedon is an editor and reporter for Just the News. Follow him on X.
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