Billionaire tech mogul Reid Hoffman is urging his fellow tech moguls in Silicon Valley not just to condemn the murders of two American citizens at the hands of Border Patrol agents, but to stop appeasing President Trump.
In X posts and opinion column written For the San Francisco Standard, Hoffman writes, “We in Silicon Valley cannot bend the knee to Trump. We cannot stand aside and hope the crisis will fade. Hope without action is not a strategy — it’s an invitation for Trump to trample on everything he can see, including our own business interests and security.”
There was some backlash among the more powerful in the valley against these deaths. Besides Hoffman, a longtime Trump critic, billionaire VC Vinod Khosla was the most vocal, calling the White House and staff “an administration without a conscience.”
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Apple CEO Tim Cook, and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei have also expressed concern about the Border Patrol incidents, some in leaked internal memos. But most of them were quick to deflect their concerns on the matter from the president himself.
This is the distinction that Hoffman wants to end. He asserts that tech leaders have power “and sitting on that power is not good for business. It’s also not neutrality. It’s a choice.”
But many of the biggest tech companies depend on the federal government for business, including regulation of artificial intelligence, tariffs that affect the cost of their products, and huge, lucrative contracts to provide technology to the U.S. government. (OpenAI even ran into some hot water in November after its CFO said, and later quit, that the company wanted the feds to freeze their loans, effectively guaranteeing payment so the AI lab could get more favorable rates.)
Hoffman echoes the sentiment of a growing segment of tech workers who have signed a petition asking their CEOs to call the White House and demand ICE leave US cities, cancel all corporate contracts with ICE and speak out publicly against ICE violence.
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While there are certainly tech leaders who remain staunch Trump supporters, such as Elon Musk and Keith Rambois of Khosla Ventures, many leaders seem to be walking, at least publicly, the fence. Cook, for example, wrote that he was “hurt” and urged “de-escalation” in his internal memo, but also they watched exclusive screening of First Lady Melania Trump’s documentary, hours after the shooting of Alex Pretty, one of the Americans killed in the ice incidents. Hence Hoffman’s call to arms.
