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The tech billionaire who said he wished Donald Trump was an “actual martyr” days before Saturday’s assassination attempt is now facing calls to resign his seat on Microsoft’s board of directors, The Post has learned.
Reid Hoffman, 56, a co-founder of LinkedIn is under pressure to resign after the National Legal and Policy Center, a Virginia-based good government non-profit, sent a letter to the corporation demanding “a special meeting” of the board to vote on his removal.
Hoffman, a dark money Democratic donor who has given tens of millions to leftist organizations has been an “independent director” since March 2017, according to Microsoft’s website.
His place on the board was given as part of his $26 billion sale of LinkedIn to Microsoft in 2016.
It’s the second time the conservative think tank has demanded Hoffman’s resignation from the board.
Last year, NLPC criticized Microsoft for allowing Hoffman to continue serving after the Wall Street Journal revealed he had visited Jeffrey Epstein’s private Caribbean island, Little Saint James, in 2014 and made plans to stay at the convicted billionaire pedophile’s Upper East Side townhouse.
Hoffman told the newspaper he had approached Epstein to raise money for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and “regretted interacting with Epstein after his conviction.”
Epstein was convicted in Florida in 2008 of soliciting a prostitute and procuring a child for prostitution as part of a controversial plea deal.
He was then ruled to have committed suicide at a Manhattan lockup where he was awaiting trial on federal sex trafficking charges in August, 2019.
“Microsoft ignored our admonitions that Reid Hoffman would eventually become an even bigger liability for the company’s reputation,” said Luke Perlot, associate director of NLPC’s Corporate Integrity Project in a press statement Wednesday.
“Microsoft now has no choice but to remove Mr. Hoffman from its board of directors. His continuing presence would demonstrate that his director colleagues implicitly condone his statements and actions.”
Neither Microsoft nor Hoffman returned requests for comment Wednesday.
On Sunday — a day after a would-be assassin tried to kill Trump at a rally in Butler, PA — Hoffman attempted to walk back inflammatory comments he had made days earlier at the Allan & Company Sun Valley Conference.
At Sun Valley, Hoffman was responding to former Stanford classmate and billionaire Peter Thiel, who sarcastically thanked him for putting money behind lawsuits against Trump, saying the legal action had turned the 45th president into a “martyr.”
“Yeah, I wish I had made him an actual martyr,” Hoffman replied, according to a report.
Hoffman is an investor with Greylock Partners, which funds tech companies and AI research in Silicon Valley. He has also doled out millions to dark money non-profits and political action committees to help elect Democratic candidates, as well as President Joe Biden.