145 tech leaders, including Vinod Khosla, Ev Williams, and Stewart Butterfield sign letter saying a Trump presidency “would be a disaster for innovation”
We are inventors, entrepreneurs, engineers, investors, researchers, and business leaders working in the technology sector.
Context & Ripple Effects
In July 2016, before the election, the response to Trump from Silicon Valley was personal rather than institutional: 145 named individuals — investors like [[entity:Vinod Khosla|Vinod Khosla]], founders like Ev Williams and Stewart Butterfield — signed an open letter framing a Trump presidency as a disaster for innovation. No company logos appear; the signature is the individual's.
That format proved to be a template. Once specific policies landed, the same collective-letter move repeated at larger scale and shifted from people to institutions, from the investor-led travel-ban letter to company-level petitions on DACA and transgender rights.
First-order effects
- Khosla, Williams, and Butterfield put personal reputations on record against Trump before the election, converting private Valley sentiment into a public, citable position other leaders can join.
- The letter makes 'innovation' the stated stake of the industry's objection, setting talent and openness as the test issues the sector would judge the candidate on.
Second-order effects
- Within months of inauguration, the individual-letter format scales up: hundreds of investors, startups, and VC firms sign on against the travel ban, arguing it harms the US startup community's ability to compete globally.
- Consumer-facing CEOs take over where VCs began — Tim Cook, Jack Dorsey, Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, Sundar Pichai, and Marc Benioff speak out individually on the transgender troop ban.
Third-order effects
- The locus moves from signatures to institutions: Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft petition the White House directly on preserving DACA, and over 50 companies including Intel sign the transgender-rights letter — the industry now lobbies as corporations, not founders.
- The 'disaster for innovation' framing sits against an administration that entered office opposing AI regulation, suggesting the durable conflict runs along talent, immigration, and civil-rights lines rather than regulatory burden.
The trend: Tech's opposition to Trump evolved from a pre-election founders' letter into recurring, institutionally organized corporate lobbying on immigration and civil-rights policy.