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- A Wired report found that employees at Silicon Valley’s largest firms have donated 20 times as much to Democratic presidential hopeful Joe Biden’s campaign than to President Trump since 2019.
- Employees at Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Alphabet, Microsoft, and Oracle have poured $4.8 million into support for Biden as the November 3 election stands weeks away.
- It’s long been known that many in the tech world oppose President Trump — Silicon Valley also largely donated to Hillary Clinton in 2016.
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A new Wired report shows overwhelming support from Silicon Valley employees for Democratic presidential hopeful Joe Biden over President Donald Trump as the Nov. 3 election draws closer.
The report shows that employees at Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google’s parent company Alphabet, Microsoft, and Oracle have collectively poured $4,787,752 into the Biden campaign since 2019 while donating $239,527 to Trump.
The data is from the Federal Election Commission, an agency that requires people who donate $200 or more to a presidential campaign to include who they work for. As the outlet notes, the data only reflects the donations of fewer than 5,300 people of the 1.4 million who work at the six tech firms collectively. It doesn’t include people who made donations smaller than $200.
Of the six firms included in the analysis, people who work for Alphabet collectively contributed the most to Biden, with donations equaling $1.8 million, as Wired notes. Oracle employees collectively contributed the least, with $204,208 going to Biden’s campaign. Workforces at Oracle and Microsoft are more divided per the report — 20% of contributions coming out of Oracle were made to Trump. Microsoft donated the most money in total — $75,428 — out of the six companies to the Trump campaign.
Leaders of some of the industry's biggest firms have come out in support of President Trump, like Oracle co-founder and Chairman Larry Ellison. But the scores of rank-and-file employees that power the tech giants have long had a collective reputation for leaning left.
Silicon Valley largely poured support into Hillary Clinton's campaign in the run-up to the 2016 presidential election. And many employees have even held demonstrations protesting their companies' involvement with the Trump administration through government contracts, such as Google's Project Maven in 2018, an artificial intelligence project with the Pentagon, as Wired notes.
Regardless of who wins, the tech world will remain under the microscope as lawmakers investigate its biggest firms over antitrust concerns. Regulation of the industry has been somewhat of a bipartisan issue, with both Democrats and Republicans agreeing that tech needs some kind of government oversight.
House Democrats released a report Tuesday as part of their yearlong antitrust investigation, declaring that Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google indeed are monopolies and are due for heavy regulation. House Republicans agreed with some parts of the report but disagreed with Democrats' call to action for the companies to be broken up.