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The LinkedIn co-founder who told a panel of billionaires he wished former president Donald Trump was an “actual martyr” days before Saturday’s assassination attempt, is a dark money donor who has contributed tens of millions to Democratic political candidates.
Reid Hoffman, 56, is among the big money supporters of numerous political action committees and non-profits that contribute to progressive and left-leaning political candidates and causes, according to publicly available FEC data.
He is a backer of the Hopewell Fund, a non-profit which is managed by Arabella Advisors, described as “a secretive dark money juggernaut” which spent more than $1 billion to propel Joe Biden to the White House in 2020 by Caitlin Sutherland, the executive director of Americans for Public Trust.
In addition to the Hopewell Fund, the group advises a coterie of related non-profits — the New Venture Fund, the Sixteen Thirty Fund, the Windward Fund and the North Fund — that target different Democratic policy issues.
Hoffman, who was named as one of the 100 most influential people in artificial intelligence (AI) by TIME last year, has also doled out more than $7 million this year to the Future Forward PAC, a California-based committee supporting Democratic candidates, according to The New York Times.
He has donated over $64 million to left-wing causes since 2015 according to the AZ Free news, which also cited FEC data.
“He’s a savvy political player for donating as much as he has,” said a tech world source, who is concerned about Hoffman’s ties to Microsoft and how that could impact the future of AI and its relationship to China. Hoffman is an executive officer of the tech company.
“It [the funding] has given the companies he works with or sits on the board of more access to lawmakers and a seat at the table,” the source continued.
“However, if the political tide goes the other way, like it may, you might be high and dry when you wash up to shore.”
On Sunday — a day after a would-be assassin tried to kill Trump at a rally in Butler, PA — Hoffman attempted to walk back his 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 Hoffman 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 walked back the comments in a lengthy X post Sunday, saying that his words had been reported out of context.
“Of course I meant nothing about any sort of physical harm or violence, which I categorically deplore,” Hoffman said on X. “I am horrified and saddened by what happened to former President Trump and wish him a speedy recovery.”
Hoffman did not return a request for comment Monday.
Hoffman co-founded LinkedIn in 2003, and sold it to Microsoft in 2016 for $26.2 billion, a deal which also offered him a seat on their board.
He was among the first investors in Open AI, the company which developed the most popular AI chatbot, ChatGPT, and he even wrote a book using the program, “Impromptu: Amplifying out Humanity Through AI.”
His investment company, Greylock Partners, has also doled out hundreds of millions of dollars to AI start-ups.
Haffman, who has counseled Kamala Harris on AI, grew up in Berkeley, California where his parents were lawyers. He attended a progressive private school in Vermont before heading to Stanford where he majored in a new program called “Symbolic Systems,” a combination of linguistics, psychology, philosophy and computer science.
Hoffman married Michelle Yee, a fellow Stanford student he met his freshman year in 2004. The couple decided not to have children because they are so focused on his work and philanthropy, Hoffman told the New Yorker in 2015.
“For me, the projects I’m doing at major scale in the world — the project is the major driver,” he told the magazine. “For her, she’s pretty focused on the spiritual side of life.”
Yee, a former clinical speech pathologist, has devoted much of her time to coordinating the couple’s philanthropic efforts, according to reports.
Hoffman may have been influenced by his paternal grandfather, who embraced progressive causes, and once took a camper van across the Soviet Union in 1985.
William Parker Hoffman was a former Santa Clara County District Attorney who served as a pilot in World War II and in the Korean War but opposed the war in Vietnam.
In 1964, he flew himself and two friends to Jackson, Mississippi, to help register black voters during the Civil Rights era.