Billionaire tech mogul Reid Hoffman is appealing to Silicon Valley tech moguls not only to condemn the killing of two Americans at the hands of Border Patrol agents, but also to stop placating President Trump.
“We in Silicon Valley cannot bow our knees to Trump,” Hoffman wrote in a post for X and an opinion column for the San Francisco Standard. “We cannot bow down and hope the crisis fades. Hope without action is no strategy. It is an invitation for Trump to trample everything in sight, including our own business and national security interests.”
There was some backlash against these deaths among the Valley's most powerful people. In addition to Hoffman, a longtime critic of Trump, one of the most vocal has been billionaire VC Vinod Khosla, who has characterized the White House and staff as an “unconscious administration.”
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Apple CEO Tim Cook, and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei have also expressed concern about the Border Patrol incident, some expressing their concerns in leaked internal memos. But most of them were quick to distance their concerns on the issue from the president himself.
That's the distinction Hoffman wants to end. He argues that technology leaders have power, and that “accommodating that power is bad for business, and it's not neutral. It's a choice.”
Still, many big tech companies rely on the federal government for business, including AI regulations, tariffs that affect the cost of their products, and large and lucrative contracts to supply technology to the U.S. government. (OpenAI also had a bit of a rough patch in November when its CFO said he wanted the federal government to backstop the loan, essentially guaranteeing payments, so the AI lab could get a better interest rate, and then walked away.)
Hoffman echoes the sentiments of a growing number of tech workers who have signed a petition calling on CEOs to call the White House and demand that ICE be withdrawn from U.S. cities, terminate all corporate contracts with ICE, and publicly speak out against ICE violence.
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While there are certainly some tech industry leaders who remain vocal supporters of Trump, such as Khosla Ventures' Elon Musk and Keith Lavoie, many appear to be on the fence, at least publicly. For example, Cook, who wrote in an internal memo that he was “heartbroken” and urged “de-escalation,” also attended an exclusive screening of a documentary about first lady Melania Trump hours after the ICE shooting of Alex Preti, one of the Americans killed in the incident. Therefore, Hoffman called for arms.