Silicon Valley billionaire donates millions to Wisconsin Democrats

MADISON, WI — A Silicon Valley billionaire who has donated millions to Wisconsin Democrats over the past four years isn’t the only super-rich person investing in Wisconsin politics.

According to the database Follow the Money, which collects campaign finance reports from states, Reid Hoffman has donated nearly $9 million to the Wisconsin Democratic Party since 2020.

Only Richard Uihlein, the Republican billionaire and megadonor and founder of the shipping company ULINE, has donated more to Wisconsin politicians and parties in that time: about $9.7 million.

Over the past few decades, Hoffman has helped found many of the top technology companies Americans use every day: PayPal, Facebook, LinkedIn and Airbnb.

But in recent years, and unlike right-leaning Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and investors Elon Musk and Peter Thiel, Hoffman has increasingly used the fortune he made there to support the Democratic Party and its politicians.

Campaign finance loophole enables millions to donate

Just a decade ago, this kind of massive political donation wasn’t possible. Wisconsin’s campaign finance law limited total political donations to $10,000 a year. Once you reached that amount, you couldn’t give more until the following year.

But a 2014 U.S. Supreme Court case, McCutcheon v. FEC, held that blanket restrictions on a person’s political donations violate his First Amendment rights.

That and other lawsuits have allowed political parties in Wisconsin to receive and distribute unlimited amounts of political money. Democrats have proposed imposing restrictions on political parties, but Republicans, who have controlled the Legislature since 2011, have so far declined to do so.

So the Democrats and their mega-donors have used it to their advantage.

It’s unclear why Hoffman, a lifelong resident of the San Francisco Bay Area, has such an interest in Wisconsin politics.

Messages to his investment company, Greylock Partners, were not returned.

But thanks to a loophole in campaign finance laws, his millions could go far in this key swing state.

Hoffman’s first political donation in Wisconsin came in 2018, when he gave $5,400 — the maximum allowed by federal law at the time — to Democratic Sen. Tammy Baldwin’s re-election campaign, according to campaign finance records. It was the first election after Donald Trump became president.

He soon moved on to making donations to the Wisconsin Democratic Party, to which he was able to donate millions.

And Hoffman has plenty of money to pour through that hole. Forbes estimates his net worth at $2.5 billion. He was one of the first employees at PayPal in the early 2000s, and along with other members of the “PayPal Mafia” like Musk and Thiel, he made a boatload of money when it was sold to eBay for $1.5 billion in 2002.

He helped launch LinkedIn, was an early investor in Facebook, and now sits on the board of Microsoft. He is deeply involved in the development of Artificial Intelligence.

Hoffman has donated at least $7 million to Vice President Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign. But he has also called on her to replace Lina Khan, the 35-year-old head of the Biden administration’s Federal Trade Commission, a government agency focused on consumer protection that tried unsuccessfully to block Microsoft’s $69 billion purchase of video game company Activision Blizzard.

Hoffman is not the only super-rich person trying to use his wealth to influence elections in Wisconsin. Many others are also taking advantage of the campaign finance loophole to funnel millions into their favorite political parties and candidates.

Other top donors in Wisconsin since 2020:

• Elizabeth Uihlein $7.7M to Republicans
• Karla Jurvetson $7.5M to Democrats
• Diane Hendricks $6.4 Million to Republicans
• George Soros $4.2 Million to Democrats
• JB Pritzker $4.1 Million to Democrats
• Sage Weil $2.2 Million to Democrats
• Lynde Uihlein $2 Million to Democrats