Facebook co-founder drops unprecedented cash to stop Trump
A new Democratic megadonor emerges from nowhere and Democrats worry he won’t stay engaged.
If the first $20 million yielded cheers, the second $15 million generated stunned silence.
Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz vaulted suddenly and without any advance warning to the top rung of Democratic party megadonors with two unheralded tears through his checkbook in the past six weeks. His money significantly altered the short-term financial position of the pro-Hillary Clinton forces and revealed a previously unknown source of cash for Democrats.
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In the days after Moskovitz's money landed, the party's leading finance operatives struggled to control their excitement at the prospect of finally having an answer to Republicans’ Sheldon Adelson in the shape of a Silicon Valley titan like the ones Democrats have been chasing after for well over a decade.
“This is a unicorn-type campaign gift — you just don’t see someone basically walk into a campaign without a significant track record of activity and contribute at this level,” said veteran Democratic strategist Chris Lehane, a Clinton White House alum who works closely with top party donors in Silicon Valley.
The deeply private 32-year-old — who is worth $12.7 billion, according to Bloomberg — is a longtime philanthropist but political newcomer. He hasn’t started to build contacts with local operatives. And he hasn’t said a word publicly about his political involvement beyond a pair of Medium posts announcing it in the first place.
So now, grateful but puzzled Democrats in Washington and Silicon Valley are wondering, does Moskovitz’s move herald the dawning of the new age of tech money that they’ve been pursuing? Or is his unparalleled cash infusion a non-replicable, one-off response to Donald Trump?
Campaign cash from the tech industry has long skewed heavily to Democrats, and in recent cycles moguls have developed a practice of pitching in toward the end of the campaign to boost candidates, most notably Barack Obama in 2012. Clinton’s bid has even mobilized a set of tech icons to get more involved than ever before, most prominently Apple CEO Tim Cook and Steve Jobs’ widow, Laurene Powell Jobs, a philanthropist and activist, as the era of Democratic resistance to giving massive donations to super PACs wanes.
But the $35 million from Moskovitz — who declined POLITICO’s request to talk about his political involvement — is far more than others have contributed, even though he wrote that such big donations to politics make him uncomfortable. And while top Democrats have developed close relationships with other Northern California luminaries as the community established itself as the party’s top money source, he has rarely been part of that circuit. (One email exchangereleased by WikiLeaks last week illustrates the dynamic: Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg in August 2015 asked Clinton campaign Chairman John Podesta whether he would consider sitting down with Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg to discuss philanthropy and public policy, and Podesta agreed to set something up. Moskovitz’s name isn’t in any of the hacked Podesta emails.)
And before this cycle, Moskovitz’s only recorded political donations had been $5,200 to the failed 2014 House bid of Sean Eldridge, the husband of fellow Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes, according to Center for Responsive Politics data.
Despite Moskovitz's hesitance to talk on the record about his involvement, his Twitter page has started to look like that of a regular political junkie, as he quotes Clinton while retweeting poll numbers. (On Oct. 12, he wrote "trumped up trickle down karma," noting Clinton's polling lead, shortly before tweeting a picture of Trump with the "demagorgon" from the TV show "Stranger Things" and calling it "This season's scariest halloween costume.")
But there was nothing before September that even hinted at the massive and sophisticated donation scheme he would unveil this time around. After announcing in September that he would drop $10 million into a Clinton campaign fund, the Senate and House Democrats’ campaign wings, MoveOn.org, the Color of Change PAC and voter registration and get-out-the-vote groups, plus $5 million each for the League of Conservation Voters and the union-backed For Our Future super PAC, he followed up early this month by pledging $7 million more to registration and mobilization organizations, $3 million to political groups, and $5 million to Priorities USA Action, the main pro-Clinton super PAC.
The sudden cash injection was unprecedented.
People familiar with Moskovitz's thinking say he had been inching toward politics after focusing primarily on philanthropy for years. But whether he joins the ranks of Tom Steyer or Haim Saban as top Democratic donors, or even becomes an Eric Schmidt-like ally to party leaders, local and national fundraisers are reluctant to guess.
Democratic operatives on the West Coast say they still haven’t met Moskovitz, haven’t seen him at party or candidate fundraising events, are not aware of whether he has a political representative helping him, and report that his name had never before been on their donation target lists. Multiple top Democrats responded to POLITICO’s questions about Moskovitz by simply replying, ‘Who?” and two admitted to looking up his name and donations on Google before responding to emails about him.
Indeed, they say, all indications are that his foray into politics is entirely driven by Trump, who Moskovitz savaged in his pair of blog posts announcing the donations, rather than a longer-term intention to become a political player.
“The Republican Party, and Donald Trump in particular, is running on a zero-sum vision, stressing a false contest between their constituency and the rest of the world. We believe their positions, especially on immigration, which purport to improve the lives of Americans, would in practice hurt citizens and noncitizens alike. In contrast, the Democratic Party, and Hillary Clinton in particular, is running on a vision of optimism, pragmatism, inclusiveness and mutual benefit,” Moskovitz wrote in September on behalf of himself and his wife, Cari Tuna, calling Trump’s promises “quite possibly a deliberate con, an attempt to rally energy and support without the ability to deliver. His proposals are so implausible that the nation is forced to worry that his interest in the presidency might not even extend beyond winning a contest and promoting his personal brand."
The day after the publication of a 2005 tape in which Trump made lewd remarks about women, Moskovitz piled on his second wave of cash: “Further investments are warranted, particularly in support of work targeting millennial and independent voters. These contributions will go towards voter outreach and engagement efforts focused on those key audiences,” he wrote. “The events of the past few weeks have only deepened my conviction that Hillary is the best choice for America. I hope that these contributions will help make that outcome a reality."
To fellow tech-world entrepreneurs and Northern California Democratic insiders, therefore, the development carries all the hallmarks of a major one-time investment — much to the frustration of party fundraising pros whose search for the next George Soros continues apace, but to the short-term delight of party operatives working to help Clinton zero in on the White House.
“Dustin is acting in the typical Silicon Valley way — be bold, go big, make a difference in the world,” said Steve Spinner, an entrepreneur and top-tier Democratic fundraiser. “Although rarely seen in politics, it’s not surprising at all given the type of person and leader he is."
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