• In 2024, Silicon Valley's most influential VCs have given $4.29 to Democrats for every dollar that goes to Republicans ($11.9m vs. $2.8m)

• Silicon Valley donations to Republicans have cratered from 2021-2022 levels

• Top VCs have given more to Democrats than Republicans in seven of the last 11 years (including 2024)

• In this same time period, VCs donated 20% more, total, to Democrats

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In May, the New York Times announced “Some Silicon Valley VCs Are Becoming More Conservative,” citing newly outspoken critics of President Biden, such as Marc Andreessen, Chamath Palihapitiya, and David Sacks. Earlier this month, Gizmodo (RIP) published a piece with the headline "Silicon Valley Goes Full MAGA in 2024," mostly focusing on the fact that Palihapitiya recently co-hosted a fundraiser for Trump with Sacks, but also singling out Sequoia partner Shaun Maguire, who in May posted he donated to Trump this year, after supporting Hillary in 2016, and no one in 2020. The same day Gizmodo ran its article, MSNBC published a piece called "Big Tech CEOs are lining up to back Trump. Don't be surprised," arguing that "[l]eadership in Big Tech is disproportionately white and male, and some of them seem to see Trump as their ultimate protector and enabler." The latter two sites' histrionics aside, the headlines certainly feel like they have a ring of truth to them, but is there data to back them up?

I pulled the numbers, cross-referencing Forbes' 2024 Midas List of top venture capitalists with the U.S. Government’s Federal Election Commission (FEC) database. I also looked specifically at the VCs currently in the media spotlight (namely, Chamath and Sacks), then zoomed out to look at broader, company-wide political donations for VC firms, which includes non-Midas investors.

Neither of the sources are perfect, but their data is still useful. The Midas List will miss VCs who don’t submit information about their investments, and the FEC database can miss contributions if data is entered incorrectly. That said, federal law requires all campaign contributions above a certain threshold be disclosed, so the FEC database should do a decent job capturing the vast majority of Silicon Valley political donations.

Here’s what I found:

Out of 100 VCs on the Midas List, 46 made political donations in the last decade. In total, these VCs made 4,511 donations totaling $162.8 million dollars across 1,069 different political organizations. Only nine gave over a million dollars in total, and much like venture capital returns, the donations followed a power law distribution: the top two donors have together given more than the rest of the list combined.

The biggest political donors on the Midas List also are “household name” VCs. Investors like Reid Hoffman ($66.5m), Peter Thiel ($49.1m), Marc Andreessen ($13.1m), Keith Rabois ($8.9m), Vinod Khosla ($8.5m), and Doug Leone ($7.6m) top the list. This is likely because Midas List staples like these guys have had longer careers to reach liquidity events from big winners and, in some cases, stacked up huge management fees.

But “rich guys make big political donations” isn’t really what we’re looking for. To find evidence for the media's claims that Silicon Valley is "going full MAGA" during this election cycle, we need to know how the right/ left breakdown for the Valley's political donations have changed over time.

Here's a chart of how Midas List VC donations have evolved over the past decade.

There are a bunch of interesting takeaways here. First, Midas List VCs have given 4.3x more to Democrats than Republicans so far this year, up from 3.3x last year — in significant part due to the fact that Thiel's donations have cratered. Second, 2021 and 2022 were actually the years VC donations skewed to the right — not this year or last year. This was mostly driven by midterm elections support for J.D. Vance in Ohio and Blake Masters in Arizona. Third, total donations in the lead up to the first Trump election in 2016 were tiny compared to those of the past few years, despite a Valley-wide freakout at the time.

If we dig into the specific Midas List investors’ donations, we can get a better picture of what’s going on in the data. Here’s a chart of every Midas List VC who’s donated over a million dollars since 2014, and how they allocated their donations.

Everyone in the Valley knows Reid Hoffman and Vinod Khosla are dyed in the wool Democrats. Same goes for Peter Thiel, Keith Rabois, and Doug Leone on the right.

What’s more interesting is that Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz of a16z landed essentially dead center. Ben and Marc do give to traditional PACs that support major party candidates, but interestingly, they donate evenly across party lines. Separately, they’ve made huge donations to cryptocurrency focused PACs (which I classify in the data as non-partisan). As a result, these donations don’t shift their position on the left-right axis of this, although some people might argue that support for cryptocurrency generally leans right.

This data shows the media's hysteria that Silicon Valley VCs are becoming more conservative this year is at odds with reality. Silicon Valley has unambiguously favored Democrats over the past decade, and so far in 2024, it still does. Moreover, top VCs have given more to Democrats than Republicans in seven of the last 11 years, and this includes 2024. In this same time period, VCs gave 20% more, total, to Democrats.

Reid Hoffman has always, and is still, supporting Democrats. Doug Leone has always, and is still, supporting Republicans. Even if you go all the way to 1998 and look at how Leone was donating, it was no different from today, but back then, it was $2,000 instead of millions.

With the exception of Shaun Maguire, the ideological consistency applies to other VCs at the middle of this media shitstorm. I couldn’t find a single example of a VC mentioned in the NYT article who actually switched their donation amount from majority Democrat to majority Republican. As mentioned, Marc Andreessen has and continues to split his donations evenly across party lines. Given that Peter Thiel and David Sacks have always donated to Republicans, it’s incoherent for the NYT to include them in a trend piece about the Valley shifting to the right. The only potential exception is Chamath, who has given millions of dollars to Democrats since 2011 compared to around $30,000 to Republicans, but recently co-hosted a Trump fundraiser with Sacks and said on the All-In podcast that he will donate to Trump (though so far this year, has barely donated any money — $1,000 — to political causes, and we don't know if and how much he will donate Democrats).

Finally, Midas list VCs make up a small sample of investors, so I zoomed out and pulled political donations at the firm-level for the 30 top VC firms. Overall, the data told the same story: in 2024, VC firms still lean left. Most changes in political leanings this year were driven by partners moving from one firm to another, such as when Keith Rabois, one of the biggest Republican donors, moved from Founders Fund to Khosla Ventures, significantly changing the average political leaning at Khosla.

The data makes it impossible to demonstrate there’s been a significant change in Silicon Valley political donations this year, so what’s actually happening? It seems like a pretty straightforward visibility issue: there are fewer professional consequences for political endorsements, so more people are making them publicly. America ’survived’ the first Trump presidency, and Elon bought Twitter. Now cancellations are less effective, or don’t work at all. In other words, the big change this election cycle is not that Doug Leone is a conservative, it’s that he feels comfortable putting out a public statement indicating that he is.

If you’re highly online, you might feel like tons of successful VCs are crossing the aisle in droves, but the data just doesn’t support that. If anything, Midas List VCs are more active in their support for Democrats this year than ever before. Given that VCs are in the business of business, and ‘should’ be more naturally aligned with Republicans, it’s possible there are more Republican VCs who sat on the sidelines during the #metoo and BLM era because of the potential consequences — though if there's a red wave coming from Silicon Valley, it’s probably going to happen when the Republicans field a less controversial candidate.

But today, most VCs still don’t engage in politics at all. In fact, there’s one PAC that gets more love from VCs than both the Republicans and Democrats: the National Venture Capital Association's VenturePAC, which offers bi-partisan support for legislation that benefits all VCs regardless of their political leanings. Because carried interest is a truly sacred cow.

— John Coogan

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John Coogan is the co-founder of Lucy.co and an Entrepreneur in Residence at Founders Fund. He previously analyzed VC political donations in February 2021, which you can see here.