Wall Street, Silicon Valley Warm Up to Donald Trump

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Bloomberg Mar 26 04:51

Some of the most successful businessmen in the country are starting to support Donald Trump's effort to regain the White House. Elon Musk, Citadel founder Ken Griffin and Oracle Corp. co-founder and Chairman Larry Ellison, among others, are either overtly or quietly embracing the GOP nominee for president. Brad Stone of Bloomberg Businessweek explains.

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Transcript

  • 00:00 Brad joins us right now from our San Francisco Bureau.
  • 00:02 His story, by the way, featured
  • 00:04 in the new issue of Bloomberg Business Week that's out on news stands on the Bloomberg and at bloomberg.com.
  • 00:08 Brad, great to have you here.
  • 00:10 Let's get to The Who, the what and the why of your story.
  • 00:12 Because the story of The Who alone
  • 00:14 reads like a who's who it feels like of Silicon Valley and also of Wall Street.
  • 00:18 So tell us about who's doing this and what they're up to.
  • 00:21 Right.
  • 00:21 Thank you, Carol.
  • 00:23 I was, I was calling it the revolt of the winners and this very conspicuous support among business leaders in in tech and primarily on Wall Street
  • 00:31 for former President Trump.
  • 00:33 And as as Tim described, there are kind of two brands of support.
  • 00:37 There's the overt support.
  • 00:39 And so you've got Howard Lutnik of Cantor Fitzgerald and John Paulson
  • 00:43 the
  • 00:44 the the hedge fund owner
  • 00:47 holding fundraisers for for Trump.
  • 00:49 Nelson Peltz Disney Foyle, who endorse
  • 00:53 Trump recently.
  • 00:55 And then
  • 00:56 the more subtle forms of of support.
  • 00:58 Ken Griffin from Citadel
  • 01:00 saying on TV that Trump would be good for the capital markets.
  • 01:03 And of course, Elon Musk on on the the service formerly known as Twitter almost every single day suggesting that he is moving in a rightward direction and
  • 01:13 has an endorsed Trump.
  • 01:14 But it's certainly putting a lot of distance between him and the current president.
  • 01:18 And as you mentioned the piece,
  • 01:20 you know he's saying Elon Musk and he hasn't endorsed and he won't donate to any political candidates, but certainly a lot can happen between now and November 5th, Brad.
  • 01:28 So.
  • 01:28 So what happened in, in terms of
  • 01:31 this transformation for some of these folks over the last four years?
  • 01:34 There were quite a few after
  • 01:37 January 6th who came out and distanced themselves from the former president.
  • 01:41 What has happened in your view over the last four years, years or over the last year to to move people back to former President Trump.
  • 01:48 Yeah, no, I mean I think it look and there are plenty of
  • 01:50 of business leaders who are moving in the opposite direction and and and endorsing or supporting President Biden and maybe in a future column I'll look at that.
  • 01:58 But there is,
  • 01:59 there is this movement that another great example is Jeff Yass by the way from Susquehanna
  • 02:05 International.
  • 02:05 The
  • 02:06 the Pennsylvania billionaire who may or may not own a portion of the company that has merged with Truth Social and given Trump potential lifeline.
  • 02:15 He was once a Never Trumper and is now certainly making some news favorable to the former president.
  • 02:20 So look, I mean, I try to diagnose what's going on here.
  • 02:24 I mean, I think there's a couple things.
  • 02:27 In the case of Jeff Yass, maybe this is very transactional.
  • 02:31 Trump has reversed his position on TikTok.
  • 02:34 Yes, he's a major owner of Bite Dance.
  • 02:36 I do think there's a sort of material concern here with some of these billionaires looking at
  • 02:41 at Biden's economic and taxation policies and and and the the idea that Biden raised in the State of the Union to
  • 02:49 to instate a billionaire tax, to increase the corporate tax rate, to roll back the higher end of some of the Trump tax cuts.
  • 02:58 There's Biden's antitrust agenda.
  • 03:00 There's the labor stance and the fact that Sean Fain from the UAW was
  • 03:06 was
  • 03:07 a guest of the White House during the State of the Union and recognized by the President.
  • 03:12 And you know to somebody like Elon Musk who runs a non union shop, these are existential concerns.
  • 03:17 So
  • 03:18 I think we can get into what some of the emotional reasons might be.
  • 03:21 But those are perhaps some of the rational decision making that's going on right now.
  • 03:25 And I totally get the rational side.
  • 03:26 I love when you get into kind of the more emotional side of like these guys are disruptors and they like when things kind of get.
  • 03:32 It feels like unsettling
  • 03:34 talk about that kind of thinking and why they may be providing support for Donald Trump.
  • 03:39 Yeah, you know, I I don't want to get too far into the psychologist's office with this analysis.
  • 03:45 But I think, you know, to some extent they feel like Biden.
  • 03:48 You know, maybe the Biden administration victimized them a little bit ran against the the 1% or the point 1%.
  • 03:56 So they don't feel recognized.
  • 03:58 I think this may be a reassessment of tech power and Wall Street power over the last decade, You know, left them feeling a little, a little victimized
  • 04:08 and and and and.
  • 04:09 Yeah, And then there's the sense of being contrarians, being disruptors.
  • 04:12 You know, Peter Thiel made this contrarian bet
  • 04:15 in 2016.
  • 04:17 And, you know, to a certain extent it backfired on him, but he got a lot of mileage out of it and he had the ear of the president back in 2016.
  • 04:25 So perhaps some of these
  • 04:27 business leaders or billionaires see where the political winds are shifting and want to have the ear of someone who they think
  • 04:35 despite,
  • 04:36 you know, the the arguments for or against, it's
  • 04:39 you know who who they might think has a shot of winning the next election.
  • 04:43 And so they're trying to get on that side of history.
  • 04:45 I think probably for a lot of these folks there are different reasons.
  • 04:50 But
  • 04:50 you know, I I don't think that we can dismiss the pure capitalism here and the idea that some of these folks just see a better tax regime and perhaps anti.
  • 05:00 Regime under.