Reid Hoffman urges Silicon Valley leaders to stop bowing to President Trump

Billionaire tech mogul Reed Hoffman he urges fellow Silicon Valley tech moguls Not only condemn the killing of American citizens at the hands of Border Patrol agents, but stop appeasing President Trump.

In posts on X and the opinion column He coined it “We in Silicon Valley cannot kneel down to Trump,” Hoffman writes in the San Francisco Standard. “We cannot stand back and hope the crisis will go away. Hope without action is not a strategy — it is an invitation for Trump to trample all he can see, including our business and security interests.”

There was some resistance among the most powerful forces in the valley against these deaths. Along with Hoffman, a longtime critic of Trump, the billionaire VC Vinod Khosla has been the most vocalHe described the White House and its staff as an “unconscious administration.”

As expressed by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Apple CEO Tim Cook, and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei Concerned about Border Patrol incidentswith some doing so in leaked internal memos. But most were quick to shift their concerns about the issue away from the president himself.

This is the discrimination that Hoffman wants to end. He asserts that technology leaders have power “and sitting in that power is not good for the business. It’s also not neutral. It’s a choice.”

However, many major technology companies depend on the federal government for their business, including regulation of artificial intelligence, tariffs that affect the costs of their products, and huge, lucrative contracts to supply the technology to the US government. (OpenAI even ran into some trouble in November after its CFO said, and later retracted, That the company wanted the Feds to back their loansessentially guaranteeing payment so the AI ​​lab can get better rates.)

Hoffman echoes the sentiments of a growing group of tech workers, Who signed the petition They are asking their executives to contact the White House and demand that ICE leave US cities for cancellation All of the company’s contracts are with ICEand speaking out against ICE violence.

While there are certainly tech leaders who remain vocal supporters of Trump, such as Elon Musk and Keith Rabois of Khosla Ventures, many leaders, at least publicly, appear to be on the sidelines. For example, Cook wrote that he was “heartbroken” and urged “de-escalation” in his internal memo, but he also civilized region An exclusive screening of First Lady Melania Trump’s documentary hours after the shooting of Alex Peretti, one of the Americans killed in the events. Hence Hoffman’s call to arms.