Tech-giants poured around $400 million into the United Nations presidential election this year, reports the Guardian.
The media ran an analysis on the donation sources of the election, where it found Tesla and SpaceX ‘owner’ Elon Musk tops the list with an estimated donation of $250 million.
According to the analysis, Silicon Valley poured more than $394.1m into the election, the bulk of it coming from an enormous donation of about $243m Elon Musk made to Donald Trump’s campaign.
A new election data analysis from the US Federal Election Commission (FEC) previously shows the increasingly heavy influence of the tech industry in US elections. Advocates of cryptocurrency were particularly active in this election as they fought to stave off regulation, pumping money into the presidential campaigns and key congressional races.
The donors came from tech’s biggest companies: Google, WhatsApp, LinkedIn and Netflix. Others were powerful venture capitalists who had made billions from investing in tech.
Trump overall received $273.2m in donations from some of tech’s biggest names, including: $242.6m from Elon Musk, owner of Tesla, SpaceX and X (formerly Twitter) who has an estimated net worth of $350bn.
$5.5m from Marc Andreessen, the billionaire founder of venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, also known as a16z. Andreessen’s co-founder, Ben Horowitz, initially supported Trump but flipped to Harris.
$5.1m from Jan Koum, the founder of WhatsApp who made the bulk of his fortune when Facebook acquired the messaging app in 2014 for $19bn.
Kamala Harris received a total of $120.9m, including: $51.1m from the Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz, who left the social media company in 2008 to start the workflow software company Asana. $17m from Reid Hoffman, the co-founder of LinkedIn. $11.7m from Chris Larsen, the billionaire chair of Ripple, a cryptocurrency company.
Bd-Pratidin English/ Afsar Munna
