A tech advisor from Silicon Valley has just made a substantial $1 million donation to President Trump.
This year, tech adviser Jacob Helberg, who previously raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for Biden’s 2020 election campaign and other Democrat candidates, has had a change of heart.
Helberg, a Jew whose grandparents survived the Holocaust, cited the left’s anti-Israel stance as a major reason for leaving the Democrat Party.
He says he began to feel out of place among Democrats, whom he described as becoming “incredibly militant.”
“I realized that I had a choice. I could either try to remain in the Democratic Party, to try to be a voice to bring it back to the center, or I could simply join a party that more closely aligned with my views,” Helberg said of his decision to switch parties and start donating to Trump’s campaign instead of Biden’s.
https://t.co/5ftLKmXkK7 pic.twitter.com/1JvI301Hdr
— Jacob Helberg (@jacobhelberg) May 15, 2024
From The Washington Post:
Four years ago, tech adviser Jacob Helberg was raising money within his elite circle for the losing presidential campaign of Democrat Pete Buttigieg.
But the pandemic, an artificial intelligence arms race against China, and taking up a crusade to ban TikTok in the United States began to shift his views and party allegiances, he says.
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.
