A Silicon Valley mogul who previously supported a variety of Democratic campaigns has switched his allegiance and donated $1 million to Donald Trump.
Jacob Helberg, who works as a senior advisor at Palantir and also heads up the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, has admitted that Trump was “right on a lot of make-or-break issues for America” and that “the social cost of supporting [him] isn’t as great as it was.”
The Washington Post reports:
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.
