Storied investor Vinod Khosla, founder and partner at Khosla Ventures, and more recently one of the first checks into OpenAI, veered off topic during a Monday interview at TechCrunch Disrupt 2024 focused on the future of AI. After talking about AI’s future and risks, he took a moment to deliver a stringent warning about the upcoming U.S. election and what’s at stake for the country.
In short, “our democracy is definitely on the line,” he said, alongside other harsh words for anyone who supported Trump — including Elon Musk.
“I can’t believe [Musk is] supporting somebody with such depraved values as Trump,” Khosla told the crowd at the conference. “I can’t imagine anyone who values ‘values’ voting for Trump,” he continued. “He’s so depraved, it’s unimaginable to me. But obviously Trump is tapping into a vein of discontent that’s very real.”
Murmurs of surprise at the fierce nature of his statements, laughter, and scattered applause rippled through the audience of mainly entrepreneurs.
The investor went on to explain why he believes the U.S. is in the position it’s in, saying that when there’s large enough discontent, people are more open to believing in anything or relying on their “own set of facts.”
He pointed to the recent misinformation circulating about FEMA in the wake of the devastating hurricanes that hit multiple states in the U.S., which had falsely claimed that the money offered by the U.S. government was actually being sent elsewhere.
Khosla pointed out that the lack of a shared set of facts was the source of this kind of misinformation. He brought up Trump’s claims of a “stolen” election as another example of this problem.
“If you say it was [stolen], I don’t really want to talk to you because we don’t share facts,” the investor noted.
Khosla also held Elon Musk, in particular, accountable for helping spread this type of misinformation on X. (Or Twitter, as Khosla referred to it, saying “I still call it Twitter.”)
After crediting Musk for his entrepreneurship — for things like electric cars and “catching that rocket with chopsticks” — he then shamed the billionaire for ignoring “all the depravity of Trump — the fact that he’s a convicted felon, charged rapist, I could go on and on,” Khosla said with vitriol.
He referenced how Musk had helped spread Trump’s misinformation, like the bizarre claim that immigrants were eating your pets.
“How ridiculous can you get? I don’t know how to communicate on that front,” Khosla said. “I don’t know what the right counter-answer is.”
Khosla, of course, has been feuding with Musk publicly and not just on the topic of the upcoming election. The two battled over a land use issue, where Musk had challenged him over making a formerly public beach parking lot private, for instance.
(Asked if Musk’s recent behavior has influenced his choices, Khosla noted “I bought my Tesla before Elon went crazy.”)
Musk and Trump criticism aside, Khosla said that the U.S. election may not have that much impact on the tech industry, specifically.
“I don’t see where their policies will be different,” he said, referring to both the right and left.
“It will be different in how we tax people, how we share wealth, what we do about the bottom 50% of the people in this country. It will be very different for them,” Khosla said.