The Bay Area spent more than $30 million sucking up to Donald Trump by shoveling donations to his inauguration, and as it turns out, tech companies like Uber, Robinhood, and Chris Larsen’s Ripple Labs all bent the knee with $1 million or more to Trump.
Back in December and January, when President-elect Donald Trump was warming up to return to office, we were pretty disappointed to see Bay Area CEOs Sam Altman and Tim Cook, and tech companies like Google and Facebook lining up to fellate Trump with $1 million donations. Even West Portal doughnut shop George's Donuts & Merriment’s owner Andrew Dudum’s company Hims & Hers donated $1 million to the Trump inauguration.
Well, get ready for more Bay Area shame. The full list of Trump inauguration donors was just released by the Federal Election Commission (FEC). The San Francisco Business Times went through it and found Trump got $30 million from Bay Area tech companies and CEOs, and that publication found some surprises in who paid how much.
Notably, the SF-based crypto platform Ripple Labs donated a stunning $4.9 million to the Trump inauguration. We should remind you that Ripple co-founder Chris Larsen donated big money to put those surveillance cameras all over town, put up the cash to revive the Fillmore Jazz Festival, and is currently one of the (if not the) biggest political donors in SF.
Other companies deserving some side-eye for their cowardly financial support of Trump include Menlo Park-based Robinhood ($2 million), and Adobe, Coinbase, Intuit, Nvidia, Perplexity AI, and Uber ($1 million apiece). Trump also got donations of less than $1 million from Anthropic, PayPal, and Scale AI.
Individuals who kicked down money to the Trump inauguration include Sam Altman and Tim Cook ($1 million apiece) and Zynga founder Mark Pincus ($97,519). Big-name VC investor Keith Rabois also gave $1 million, but that’s not a surprise. Rabois has long been a Silicon Valley right-winger, and he’s one of those tech douchebags who made a big stink about leaving San Francisco during the pandemic, only to quietly move back.
Why all this Bay Area tech money to Trump? Probably because executives know that by staying on Trump’s good side, they can get away with sensational corruption and criminality.
If you think I’m exaggerating when I say “corruption and criminality,” consider the case of crypto mogul Justin Sun. (He’s best known for buying the banana taped to the wall for $6.2 million.) Sun was facing SEC fraud investigations for his crypto schemes under the Biden administration, though he shrewdly spent $75 million on Trump-themed crypto coins.
Now that Trump is in power, the SEC has put all charges against Sun on hold.
Related: Trump Launches Meme Coin Ahead of Inauguration In Likely Pump-and-Dump Scheme [SFist]
Image: NEW YORK, NEW YORK - JULY 29: People wait in line for t-shirts at a pop-up kiosk for the online brokerage Robinhood along Wall Street after the company went public with an IPO earlier in the day on July 29, 2021 in New York City. Robinhood Markets Inc. shares fell about 5% during its Nasdaq debut. (Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images)
