Article fails to mention how almost all of big tech backed Harris (and spent over a billion) and Trump only gets the Thiel and his acolytes. They play both sides and will continue to.
For example, Morgan and Morgan was the largest corporate campaign donor (by dollars donated by employees) to Hillary Clinton's 2016 campaign. John Morgan was a very vocal Clinton supporter. High level staffers from Hillary's campaign ended up attending some Morgan and Morgan company party events bringing powerful media connections with them as guests (I was there).
Also in tech companies which are socially liberal, you will have coworkers who will search for right-wing donators within the company and out them publicly (in a negative context) in Slack, etc. I've seen such messages.
Which is mostly misleading – corporations represent the shared interests of their stockholders not their employees, who often have adversarial material and political interests to their employers. Corporations political participation is through corporate PACs and independent expenditures, not primarily through the direct campaign contributions of people who happen to work with them.
Interesting, while contributions are reported blindly by employer, federal election law on corporate PACs recognizes this distinction in the “restricted class” of decision–making employees from whom corporate PACs may solicit donations. It would be interesting if direct contributions by employees were divided between this “restricted class” and other employees. (Though, again, stockholders are still more indicative of corporate interest than any class of employees.)
Companies/shareholders exercise their interests by _controlling who they hire_. We even cover over this with how we recruit and demographically.
When you're talking about industries that skew towards highly paid employees (tech, legal, etc), you're actually determining winners and losers in society by political affiliation.
"Skip houses with Trump signs."
No, I’m disagreeing with it.
> Companies get political favor by the donation activity of their employees
No, they don’t. The general public may have no further insight and basis to assign credit or blame than FEC reports by employee donations, but actual political actors have a lot deeper understanding and, if they are inclined to reward companies for political support, are a lot more specific to the support from the firm as a firm vs support from employees which may well be orthogonal or contrary to corporate interest.
This said, the rich will keep sending money to candidates they believe will represent their agenda,no matter what side they are. That's why Big Tech is changing its tune now.
Elon Musk personally spent $250 million on Trump, not to mention getting far more personally involved in bending Twitter (which he spent $44 billion on) towards that end than any other social media network ever had previously.
And Zucks who used to play both sides but did a face-heel turn to MAGA before this November. And speaking of it, the Winkelvosses, too.
(And of course many tech-adjacent finance billionaires, and all the „old money“ heirs who own and vote the shares of the Mag 7.)
Harris's campaign spent more than 2:1 what Trump's did and also had public endorsements from just about every celebrity you could imagine. That's not nothing.
What's remarkable here is that the value of the celebrity endorsement took a massive nosedive this election without the Democrats realizing it.