Apple CEO Tim Cook and the rest of Silicon Valley throw big money at Clinton and pretty much bupkis at Trump

“Tim Cook will mark his five-year anniversary as the CEO of Apple by doing something that his predecessor Steve Jobs typically avoided: hosting a fundraiser for a presidential candidate,” Seth Fiegerman reports for CNNMoney. “On Wednesday, Cook and Lisa Jackson, Apple’s head of environmental initiatives, will host an event in California to raise money for Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. Those invited have reportedly been asked to contribute as much as $50,000.”

“Cook is just the latest in a growing list of tech executives and venture capitalists working to raise big money to help Clinton beat Donald Trump, who has repeatedly attacked tech companies and opposes the industry on key issues like immigration and trade,” Fiegerman reports. “Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, Google CFO Ruth Porat, Zynga chairman Mark Pincus, Napster founder Sean Parker, SolarCity CEO (and Elon Musk’s cousin) Lyndon Rive and LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman have all contributed or raised at least $100,000 for Clinton’s bid.”

“That’s according to a lengthy list of top fundraisers, dubbed ‘Hillblazers,'” put out by the campaign. The list also includes tech investors like Brook Byers, a founding partner of Kleiner Perkins, and Chamath Palihapitiya, an early Facebook exec. Even Laurene Powell Jobs, the widow of Apple’s late apolitical founder, is there,” Fiegerman reports. “Trump’s campaign has yet to release a comparable list of bundlers, but broader data on campaign contributions for this election shows a wide gap in the tech industry’s financial support. ‘Clinton has raised far more than Trump from the tech industry — around $4 million, compared to just a tiny fraction of that for Trump,’ says Sheila Krumholz, executive director at the Center for Responsive Politics (CRP), which tracks money in politics. How much is a ‘tiny fraction’ of tech funding? Just shy of $200,000.”

“[The] gaping disparity is particularly clear when looking at contributions from employees at specific tech companies,” Fiegerman reports. “At Apple, for example, employees gave $156,893 to Clinton’s campaign through the end of June, according to CRP’s data. By comparison, Trump’s campaign received just $665 from the group.”

Much more in the full article here.

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