Reid Hoffman urges Silicon Valley leaders to stop bowing to President Trump

Billionaire tech mogul Reed Hoffman is urging his fellow Silicon Valley tech moguls to not only condemn the killing of American citizens at the hands of Border Patrol agents, but also to stop appeasing President Trump.

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There was some resistance among the most powerful forces in the valley against these deaths. Along with Hoffman, a longtime Trump critic, billionaire Vinod Khosla has been the most vocal, describing the White House and its staff as a “mindless administration.”

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Apple CEO Tim Cook, and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei have also expressed concern about the Border Patrol incidents, with some doing so in leaked internal memos. But most were quick to shift their concerns about the issue away from the president himself.

This is the discrimination that Hoffman wants to end. He asserts that technology leaders have power “and sitting in that power is not good for the business. It’s also not neutral. It’s a choice.”

However, many major technology companies depend on the federal government for their business, including regulation of artificial intelligence, tariffs that affect the costs of their products, and huge, lucrative contracts to supply the technology to the US government. (OpenAI even ran into some trouble in November after its CFO said, then later retracted, that the company wanted the feds to back their loans, essentially guaranteeing payment so the AI ​​lab could get better rates.)

Hoffman echoes the sentiments of a growing group of tech workers, who have signed a petition asking their CEOs to contact the White House and demand that ICE leave American cities, cancel all of the company’s contracts with ICE, and speak out against ICE violence.

While there are certainly tech leaders who remain vocal supporters of Trump, such as Elon Musk and Keith Rabois of Khosla Ventures, many leaders, at least publicly, appear to be on the sidelines. For example, Cook wrote that he was “heartbroken” and urged “de-escalation” in his internal memo, but he also attended an exclusive screening of First Lady Melania Trump’s documentary hours after the shooting of Alex Peretti, one of the Americans killed in the incidents. Hence Hoffman’s call to arms.