It’s Silicon Valley vs. Silicon Valley as Political Fights Escalate

Elon Musk, Reid Hoffman and other tech billionaires,
-- many of whom are part of the “PayPal Mafia,”
-- are openly brawling with one another over politics as tensions rise.

Less than an hour after a gunman in Butler, Pa., tried to assassinate Donald Trump this month,
David #Sacks, a venture capitalist based in San Francisco,
directed his anger about the incident toward a former colleague.

“The Left normalized this,” Mr. Sacks wrote on X, linking to a post about Reid #Hoffman, a technology investor and major Democratic donor.

Mr. Sacks implied that Mr. Hoffman, a critic of Mr. Trump who had funded a lawsuit accusing the former president of rape and defamation, had helped cause the shooting.

Elon #Musk, who leads SpaceX and Tesla and previously worked with Mr. Sacks and Mr. Hoffman,
then weighed in on X, name-checking Mr. Hoffman and saying people like him “got their dearest wish.”

In Silicon Valley, the spectacle of tech billionaire attacking tech billionaire has suddenly exploded,
as pro-Trump executives and their Democratic counterparts have openly turned on each other.

The brawling has spilled into public view online, at conferences and on podcasts,
as debates about the country’s future have turned into personal broadsides.

The animus has pit those who once worked side by side and attended each other’s weddings against one another,
fraying friendships and alliances that could shift Silicon Valley’s power centers.

The fighting has been particularly acute among the “PayPal Mafia,”
a wealthy group of tech executives
— including Mr. Hoffman, Mr. Musk, Mr. Sacks and the investor Peter #Thiel
— who worked together at the online payments company in the 1990s
and later founded their own companies or turned into high-profile investors.

Other tech leaders have also been pulled into the political spats, including Vinod #Khosla, a prominent investor, and Marc #Andreessen and Ben #Horowitz of the Silicon Valley venture firm Andreessen Horowitz.

Their unabashed vitriol is stark.

While tech leaders often criticize one another in private,
they rarely do so publicly for fear of upsetting a potential deal partner or future job prospect.

“Until a year or two ago, there was something like an #omertà in Silicon Valley,” said Roger McNamee,
a Silicon Valley venture capitalist, using a word popularized by the Italian mafia for a code of silence.

“People had fights all the time and leaders would disagree, but you wouldn’t disagree in public.”
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