About a week ago, tech billionaire and Democratic political donor Reid Hoffman spoke out about the silence and publicly suggested that Kamala Harris fire FTC Chair Leigh Lina Khan, if she wins the White House in November. Hoffman also happens to sit on the board of directors of Microsoft, a company that has been the target of multiple investigations by Khan’s agency over the past few years. Since making her controversial remarks, Huffman has been working overtime to convince the American public that what looks like influence peddling is not what it is.
Huffman again tried to defend her comments yesterday on CNN. To do this, he developed a unique psychological theory that attempted to link how he appeared to have a conflict of interest when in fact he had none. According to him, there are actually many different Reed Hoffmans. One of them, Hoffman, is a member of Microsoft’s board of directors. The other, Hoffman, plays an “expert” with vague but obviously powerful qualifications. Another Hoffman is a political donor. According to him, all of these Hoffmanns interacted with the world independently, and their interests were never aligned.
After CNN anchor Jake Tapper asked Huffman if that’s what he did, Huffman claimed: “I’m totally on board with not spending money to buy influence.” However, when his financial contribution seemed to depend on the future How could this be the case when it comes to favors?
Hoffman explained it this way:
“I will give the donor and [as] expert. So if you ask me as a donor, I would say I donate to Kamala Harris because I think she is the best president in the future… But if you ask me as an expert, about Lena Khan What is being done and where I think she is helping or hurting the United States relative to your anti-merger policies, which are, you know, mostly [there] File a lawsuit instead of, you know, [being] Really rooted in…what helps American businesses thrive at home and abroad—and then I give my expert opinion. But I think donors and experts should be kept separate, and I’ve never connected the two in any conversation.
Psychologists take note. This unique theory of the human mind could upend everything we know about how and why humans behave. At the very least, it could help explain why Huffman appears to be telling Harris to fire Khan so that the company in which he has a huge financial interest – Microsoft – can continue to consolidate its power in the tech industry, even though, obviously, that’s not what he’s doing What!
During this silly conversation, Tapper finally decided to meet the minimum standards required to call himself a journalist and pointed out the obvious to Hoffman: “There aren’t a hundred Reed Hoffmans! It’s not like any of you One is a donor, one has a problem with Lena Khan, one is on the board of Microsoft, one is a venture capitalist, you are all the same person,” he said.
In this regard, Hoffman actually has nothing to say. Clearly, he had always hoped that his unique theory of personality would influence Tapper and audiences at home. He turned to a simple denial: “I never talked to Kamala Harris about this,” Huffman insisted.
Why Hoffman publicly recommended that Harris fire Khan is obvious to anyone with even a passing familiarity with the FTC’s activities over the past few years. Under Khan, the agency launched a multi-year effort to block a merger between Microsoft and Activision Blizzard, arguing it would make Microsoft the third-largest gaming company in the country. Then, last month, the Federal Trade Commission launched an investigation into Microsoft’s relationship with InflectionAI, an artificial intelligence startup with which the tech giant entered into a business arrangement earlier this year. Hoffman and others at Microsoft clearly wanted to shut down the investigation, and they thought the way to do that was to oust Khan.
Silicon Valley played an unusually prominent role in this year’s presidential election. While it’s routine for tech executives to donate to political candidates, it’s less common for those executives to loudly and conspicuously declare their support for one candidate over another. However, in recent weeks, crypto tycoons and red-pill billionaires such as Elon Musk and Marc Andreessen have publicly declared their support for Donald Trump, while a group recently officially named VCs for Kamala of venture capital firms also came out in support of Harris.
The VCsforKamala crowd included signatories from more than 100 different companies, including Huffman himself, as well as several others associated with companies that had previously lobbied against the FTC’s intervention in the Microsoft-Activision deal. It’s just another sign that tech industry heavyweights think they have a lot to lose (and potentially a lot more to gain) depending on who ends up in the White House next year.
Wow @jaketapper Billionaire Reid Hoffman asked about his massive donation to Kamala Harris and his public call to fire Lina Khan, an antitrust enforcer who was investigating his company ) Case. Things didn’t look good for Hoffman. pic.twitter.com/X9xPys3iIg
— Matt Stoller (@matthewstoller) July 31, 2024
