June 24, 2024 - 7:30pm

Forbes reported yesterday that “Crypto is braced for a huge Biden flip” ahead of Thursday’s presidential debate, as Democrats fret over Donald Trump’s growing support from the industry. This comes days after Trump’s “small but vocal group” of supporters in finance and Silicon Valley just grew by two Winklevii and $2 million in Bitcoin — though part of this was then refunded in line with electoral law.

Earlier this month, Politico reported that Trump trekked to San Francisco to “court a small but vocal group of sympathetic tech entrepreneurs and venture capitalists who, following the likes of Elon Musk, are embracing Trump’s bombastic but business-friendly platforms in rebuke of President Joe Biden and Democrats’ policies”.

On his agenda in the Bay Area was a “$300,000-per-person fundraiser, hosted at billionaire venture capitalist David Sacks’s Pacific Heights mansion”. Reflecting on the event, Sacks said: “Maybe it creates a preference cascade and it becomes acceptable to acknowledge the truth. Which is that a lot of people support Trump.”

Fast forward less than a month and the twin kings of crypto have joined the bandwagon. Tyler Winklevoss published a 1,400-word X post late last week coming out as a Trump supporter. His twin brother Cameron jumped on the bandwagon 15 minutes later, writing that he too would be voting for Trump in November. Both donated $1 million in Bitcoin to Trump’s campaign, citing the candidate’s position on cryptocurrencies in their endorsements. “Here’s the TL;DR,” wrote Cameron. “President Trump is: Pro-Bitcoin Pro-Crypto Pro-Business.”

Tyler and Cameron, known best for their feud with Mark Zuckerberg over the creation of Facebook, now work respectively as the CEO and president of Gemini, an embattled crypto exchange. Early adapters of digital currency, the Winklevoss brothers have been targeted by a common enemy of Trump’s: New York Attorney General Letitia James.

Their endorsements rolled in shortly before Trump’s appearance on the All-In podcast dropped, bringing him face to face with venture capitalists Sacks and Chamath Palihapitiya, who co-hosted the aforementioned fundraiser just three weeks ago. Media round-ups of similar endorsements include Shaun Maguire of Sequoia Capital and Jacob Helberg of Palantir. (Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel declined to fund Trump this cycle. His Zero to One co-author Blake Masters is running for Congress as a pro-Trump Republican in Arizona.)

On top of all this, “Pharma Bro” Martin Shkreli is now claiming he created the DJT crypto token with Trump’s son Barron, though evidence of the latter’s involvement is unsurprisingly limited. Nathan Leamer, a centre-right analyst at the Digital First Project, told me the endorsements “make sense” because Trump is “engaging with those who are transforming our world”.

The crypto-to-Trump pipeline is straightforward enough. For the moment, at least, Biden’s administration is not friendly to the industry — and Trump is eagerly exploiting that break. The same could be said of business in general, given Trump’s deregulatory agenda which even managed to attract a smattering of high-net-worth supporters in 2016 and 2020. Like Sacks, Palihapitiya and the Winklevosses, many of those supporters have donation records not unlike Trump himself, split between the Republicans and Democrats.

What’s different now is the shamelessness of the enthusiasm for Trump — an unthinkable development in the tense days after January 6, when even staunch conservatives were nervously backing away from MAGA. It’s a trend only possible amid the present “vibe shift”, in which self-serious tattling has lost its currency with publicists and billionaires and average Joes alike. The permission structure is changing.

While crypto and foreign policy have visibly driven more public (and perhaps private) excitement for Trump, their motivations are clearly broader. In his endorsement post on X, Tyler Winklevoss argued the Biden administration “has been dismantling our economic way of life and the system that made America the greatest country in the world”. A “huge Biden flip” along the lines of what Forbes reported on yesterday might not be enough.

There’s really no easy way to quantify the energy around Trump in finance and tech. Even if it’s translating to small gains for the Republican candidate, from black Americans to younger voters, those gains threaten to open the floodgates to a “preference cascade”, to borrow a phrase from Sacks.

As American business seemed briefly to be captured by the cultural Left — see the GOP’s bitter break with the Chamber of Commerce as proof — the likelier outcome now resembles something different and more familiar. Like other corners of America, Silicon Valley, once the fiefdom of Barack Obama, is now polarised.


Emily Jashinsky is UnHerd‘s Washington D.C. Correspondent.

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