Yahoo Finance

Donald Trump made a splash this past week in Silicon Valley, signaling he wants to compete for the Bay Area’s deep pockets.

But President Biden isn’t going to give those donors up without a fight.

A review of campaign finance records, including Biden’s top individual contributors so far this campaign season, shows that the president is still very much in the fight for Big Tech cash in 2024.

LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman sits atop Biden's list with more than $9 million in donations to the president and outside groups supporting Biden, according to data compiled by campaign finance trackers at OpenSecrets.

Hoffman has given millions more to groups supporting Democratic congressional candidates.

He even posted an essay about his support for Biden Thursday, just as Trump headed to San Francisco for a highly anticipated fundraiser that appears to have put about $12 million in the former president’s coffers.

The Hoffman essay was a rebuttal of sorts to the inroads Trump has made among tech executives and Wall Street more generally, with an argument that Trump’s behavior and his disregard for the rule of law would be bad for business.

"Unfortunately, many American business leaders have recently developed a kind of myopia, miscalculating what politics, and which political leaders, will truly support their long-term success," Hoffman wrote.

He is hardly the only one on the West Coast with those views. Eight of Biden’s top 20 supporters so far this campaign have direct ties to Silicon Valley. Those figures range from Sequoia Capital's Michael Moritz, with $7.3 million in donations so far, to former Facebook (META) COO Sheryl Sandberg, who has given more than half a million.

The list grows when Biden's big supporters in Hollywood are included. DreamWorks co-founder Jeffrey Katzenberg and actor Seth MacFarlane have given more than $1 million each, according to the records.

The totals could already be significantly higher, with campaign finance records running on a delay because of disclosure requirements. Much of the data compiled in recent days is through April, with some updates not expected for weeks or months given the varying disclosure rules.

And many billionaire gifts to both candidates will, of course, never be known, with certain groups able to accept so-called dark money that isn't disclosed.

Dueling trips to the valley

The race for Big Tech’s cash played out during recent twin trips by Biden and Trump to the area.

Biden visited Silicon Valley in early May. He first traveled to the Portola Valley home of Vinod Khosla, the billionaire co-founder of Sun Microsystems, to raise cash.