Silicon Valley braces for Biden and the ‘techlash’

David Barrett did not start Expensify for political reasons, but a lot has changed in the last four years. On Oct 22, less than two weeks before the US election, Barrett sent a 1,300-word email to all of his company’s 10m customers, begging them to vote out Donald Trump.

“Anything less than a vote for [Joe] Biden is a vote against democracy,” Barrett wrote to a global audience, some of whom cancelled their accounts with the San Francisco tech company the next morning. “We are facing an unprecedented attack on the foundations of democracy itself.”

The email was extraordinary, but Barrett’s sentiments are not unusual ones in Silicon Valley. Donations to Biden’s presidential campaign at major tech companies outnumber those to Trump’s by 20 to one. Billionaires including Eric Schmidt, the former Google chief executive, and Reid Hoffman, the LinkedIn founder, have given millions to groups supporting the former vice president.

Tech industry support for the Democrats is nothing new. Bill Clinton won the backing of a previously Republican-leaning Silicon Valley in 1992 with a promise to unleash the internet’s potential and invest in research. Barack Obama enthusiastically courted executives.

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