Billionaire tech mogul Reid Hoffman is urging his fellow tech moguls in Silicon Valley to not just condemn the killings of two American citizens at the hands of Border Patrol agents, but to stop pacifying President Trump.
In posts on X and an opinion column penned for The San Francisco Standard, Hoffman writes: “We in Silicon Valley can’t bend the knee to Trump. We can’t shrink away and hope the crisis fades. Hope without action is not a strategy –– it’s an invitation for Trump to trample whatever he can see, including our own business and security interests.”
There’s been some pushback among the most powerful in the Valley against these deaths. Besides Hoffman, a longtime critic of Trump, billionaire VC Vinod Khosla has been the most vocal, characterizing the White House and crew as “a conscious-less administration.”
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Apple CEO Tim Cook, and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei have also expressed concern over the Border Patrol incidents, with some doing so in leaked internal memos. But most of them were quick to distance their concerns over this issue from the president himself.
That’s the distinction that Hoffman wants to end. He’s making the case that tech leaders have power “and sitting on that power is not good for business. It’s also not neutrality. It’s a choice.”
Still, many of the largest tech companies depend on the federal government for business, including AI regulation, tariffs that affect the costs of their products, and massive, lucrative contracts to supply the U.S. government with technology. (OpenAI even got in a bit of hot water in November after its CFO said, and later walked back, that the company wanted the feds to backstop their loans, essentially guaranteeing payment so the AI lab could get more favorable rates.)
Hoffman is echoing the sentiment of a growing contingent of tech workers, who have signed a petition asking their CEOs to call the White House and demand that ICE leave U.S. cities, to cancel all company contracts with ICE, and to speak out publicly against ICE’s violence.
While there certainly are tech leaders who remain vocal supporters of Trump, like Elon Musk and Keith Rabois of Khosla Ventures, many leaders appear to be, at least publicly, walking the fence. Cook, for instance, wrote that he was “heartbroken” and urged “de-escalation” in his internal memo, but also attended an exclusive screening of First Lady Melania Trump’s documentary hours after the ICE shooting of Alex Pretti, one of the Americans killed in the incidents. Hence Hoffman’s call to arms.