While President Biden enjoys wide support in the tech sector, Trump is starting to make some inroads.
SAN FRANCISCO—Jacob Helberg didn’t start out as a big fan of former President Donald Trump.
In his 2021 book, “The Wires of War,” Mr. Helberg detailed his concerns about the former president, during and after his first administration when he was working on disinformation and foreign interference at Google.
“After Biden’s victory, millions of Americans—egged on by Trump—indulged in unwarranted conspiracy theories claiming that Trump had in fact won,” wrote Mr. Helberg, at that time the co-chair of the Brookings Institution’s China Strategy Initiative, when describing efforts in Silicon Valley to fight what he called “domestic disinformation.”
He was a bundler for Pete Buttigieg’s presidential run during the 2020 cycle.
Yet in recent weeks, Mr. Helberg, now an adviser to Palantir CEO Alex Karp, has come forward as a vocal supporter of former President Trump. In May, the Washington Post publicized his $1 million donation to the Trump campaign.
“I am far from ruling out additional support for President Trump,” Mr. Helberg told The Epoch Times.
In 2020, many of President Joe Biden’s biggest supporters came from Big Tech. They included Facebook cofounder Mark Zuckerberg, LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman, and Laurene Powell Jobs, the widow of Apple cofounder Steve Jobs. Many tech millionaires and billionaires are supporting him again in 2024. Vinod Khosla, of Khosla Ventures, hosted a fundraiser for President Biden in May. Marissa Mayer, Yahoo’s former chief executive, held a reception for him, too.
This time, though, the former president seems to be gaining ground in the tech world, including through high-profile donations like Mr. Helberg’s.
The tech insider dismissed the recent guilty verdict against the former president in New York, saying the trial was “widely regarded as a sham.”
“The conviction seemed more like a vengeful act,” Mr. Helberg said.
When asked why he had changed his mind about the former president, Mr. Helberg drew attention to the Obama administration’s approach to China—what he called “a policy of managed decline”—as well as the “woke wave of 2020,” which he said has come to dominate the party he once favored.
