This Is How Tech Billionaires Influence the U.S. Presidential Race

With every election in the United States, money comes to the forefront of the campaign debate, amid a rising spending, but the race between Joe Biden and Donald Trump threatens to exceed several ceilings in electoral propaganda.

In 2020, Americans spent nearly $15 billion on election campaigns (TV advertising and social media ads), $6.6 billion of which was spent on presidential elections, and more than $9 billion on congressional and state governors’ elections. Estimates expect the 2024 elections to witness spending exceeding $20 billion.

In a specific context, many recent studies and polls have confirmed that the role of tech companies has increased significantly in the last two decades, and this has coincided with the growing role of social media, which almost surpasses traditional media in ensuring direct communication with voters.

As a direct result of this, candidates for the U.S. presidential and general elections have shown increased interest in tech companies, whether to win over their owners and obtain their donations or to use them in their campaigns.

On the other hand, most Americans are wary of social media’s role in politics and its overall impact on the country, and these concerns are ticking up among Democrats, according to a new Pew Research Center survey of U.S. adults. 

Still, Republicans stand out on several measures, with majorities believing major technology companies are biased toward Democrats.

Donors to Democrats

An official dinner hosted by U.S. President Joe Biden at the White House last April aroused the interest of observers of the presidential race, especially since the guest list included some of the most prominent tech moguls in the United States.

This occasion highlighted the role that they may play, through their influence, money, and technological platforms, in the calculations of the U.S. elections this year.

The guest list included Apple CEO Tim Cook, Amazon CEO and Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos, Google CEO Sundar Pichai, Microsoft's vice chair and president Brad Smith, President and CEO of Micron Sanjay Mehrotra, CEO of Panasonic Corporation of North America Megan Myungwon Lee, and Vice Chairman of IBM Gary Cohn, who resigned as chief economic advisor to former President Donald Trump.

However, the absence of some big names from the dinner, such as president of Meta Mark Zuckerberg, co-founder of Microsoft Bill Gates, and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, who usually lean toward the Democrats, did not appear as an exclusion or boycott of the occasion.

While the absence of Elon Musk, head of Tesla and owner of X platform, was understandable, after he had come a long way in declaring his opposition to Biden and to Democrats in general.

So far, billionaire Mark Zuckerberg has not announced his direct support for Biden, but his support for the Democrats was explicit earlier, especially since he voted for them in the previous elections.

In the 2020 election, Zuckerberg was a prominent donor to Democrats. He and his wife, Priscilla Chan, gave nearly half a billion dollars to two nonprofit organizations, distributing grants to more than 2,500 constituencies that were suffering from a lack of government funding during the Corona pandemic.

Republicans called those grants "Zuckerbucks," saying they helped Democrats buy the presidency for Joe Biden, and they led campaigns to enact state-level legislation to stop funding election offices from private parties.

As for Jeff Bezos, the second-largest billionaire in the world, he is considered one of the most prominent supporters of the Democrats.

His name was even put forward last year to be among the figures that the Democratic Party was considering nominating for the presidency. Although he ruled out this idea for this year, he left the door open to this possibility in future election cycles.

Sam Altman also announced last year that he had donated $200,000 to Biden's re-election campaign. Altman is one of the major donors who make up the bulk of Biden's fundraising.

Reid Hoffman, the billionaire co-founder of LinkedIn, has offered to host fundraising events for Biden.

On his part, Tim Cook is one of the largest donors supporting the Democrats, and he often participates in events to support their presidential candidate, especially in the recent period that comes before the elections.

Donors to Republicans

While there is an impression that tech company billionaires often side with Democrats, the reality appears to be quite the opposite, with important figures siding with Republicans.

Among the most prominent dissenters from supporting the Democrats is Elon Musk, who has always voted for them in recent years because they were nice, according to what he described them.

Musk, after his acquisition of Twitter, not only changed the name of the platform to X but also changed its identity and its rules for political censorship.

One of the billionaire's first decisions was to return Trump's account to the platform, after it was suspended due to the assault on the Capitol building on January 6, 2021.

Although Musk voted for Biden in 2020 and made donations to both parties, Musk is not considered a major donor.

Musk's political positions often seem ambiguous, despite his clear Republican leanings.

He said weeks ago that he would not donate to any of the candidates for the position of President of the United States this year, before reinforcing his political bias toward Republicans in another post in which he said that America is doomed to failure if a red wave does not occur in the presidential elections.

Musk also explicitly called on voters to vote Republican, while several American newspapers reported that he met with Trump last March.

On April 26, David Sacks and Elon Musk convened a dozen or so of America’s most powerful business leaders for dinner at Sacks’ home in the Hollywood Hills. 

The guest list reportedly included media mogul Rupert Murdoch, former chair of News Corp which owns Fox News; former Uber CEO Travis Kalanick, one-time member of Trump’s economic advisory council; and PayPal co-founder and 2016 Trump supporter Peter Thiel. 

But all were there as members of a burgeoning anti-Biden brain trust, united by a shared sense of grievance.

The get-together, which has not been previously reported, is the latest evidence of Musk’s growing power beyond Silicon Valley, as he’s evolved from political hobbyist to media owner and conservative icon. 

Musk recently has told associates that he’s interested in formalizing his running political commentary on X into an official endorsement of some sort—either a statement against President Biden, or even something supporting Donald Trump. 

Realizing the importance of social media platforms in moving public opinion and helping to persuade hesitant voters, Trump has been keen over the past months to strengthen his relationships with active figures in the world of technology, not affiliated with the Democrats.

Top Republican donors include Oracle co-founder Larry Allison, who donated more than $30 million to Sen. Tim Scott before withdrawing from the race.

Several media outlets reported that Allison had dinner with Trump several times recently.

Peter Thiel, a former board member of Zuckerberg's Meta company, is also one of Trump's major donors and a major fundraiser for him.

Jeff Yass, who owns a 15% stake in ByteDance, which owns the famous Chinese application TikTok, is also expected to be among Trump's major supporters, especially after the latter changed his position on banning the application, after meeting with him last month.

Despite denying talk about TikTok, The New York Times quoted a person close to the Trump campaign anticipating that Yass would soon make a large donation to Trump’s campaign.

Expected Effect

The new rules approved by Meta, the owner of the Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Threads platforms, last April regarding reducing the visibility of political posts and accounts to followers, raised many questions about the expected impact on the campaigns of candidates in the U.S. elections.

Among Meta's new changes was not filtering the appearance of political content to users on its platforms by default, but limiting the issue to showing posts from the political accounts that the user follows on Facebook and Instagram, which led to concerns among candidate campaigns about reaching the target American audience.

Those rules came despite Mark Zuckerberg touting his company's influence in politics, days after Donald Trump won the 2016 presidential election.

Comparing March 2020 to March 2024, both Biden and Trump campaigns saw a 60% drop in their average engagement per Facebook post.

Spending on political ads on these media is expected to double from $324 million in 2020, to $605 million in 2024, according to estimates by the digital analytics company eMarketer.

Senior Trump campaign adviser Chris LaCivita likened Meta's measures to reduce the visibility of political content to a form of shadow bans, when tech companies allow users to post but secretly limit who sees the content.

Data released by Pew Research Center surveys on January 31 indicate that about three-quarters of American adults under the age of 30 (74%) use at least five of the most popular social media platforms.

This is much higher than the proportions of people aged 30 to 49 years (53%), 50 to 64 years old (30%), and those aged 65 years and older (8%).

In addition, YouTube (used by 73% of U.S. adults) and Facebook (69%) are the most used platforms, while nearly half of adults (47%) use Instagram, and 27% use X.

While between 27% and 35% use TikTok, WhatsApp, Snapchat, Pinterest, and LinkedIn. Adult users spend more than an hour a day using social media networks.

Since 2020, more Americans — particularly Democrats — believe social media companies wield too much political power. 

Roughly eight-in-ten Americans (78%) say these companies have too much power and influence in politics today, according to a new Pew Research Center survey.

Another 16% say these sites have the right amount of political influence, while only 4% think they don’t have enough power.