Silicon Valley Money Men Are Buzzing About Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. says childhood vaccines are linked to autism and that the Central Intelligence Agency killed his uncle. He has wondered out loud whether Wi-Fi exposure leads to cancer. Some of tech’s big stars are praising his campaign for president. 

Silicon Valley loves a contrarian, which is why some tech luminaries threw their support to Republican Donald Trump in 2016 and 2020. This time around, Kennedy, a Democrat, is the one getting the antiestablishment buzz in the tech world. 

Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey has recently voiced support for Kennedy, who is running against President Biden for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination. Kennedy has been feted by a handful of other tech titans, including SPAC king Chamath Palihapitiya and David Sacks, a founding executive of PayPal and trusted ear to Elon Musk. Mark Gorton, founder of the now-closed file-sharing website LimeWire, started a PAC that supports Kennedy. 

They say they like his willingness to go against the status quo. 

“Mr. Kennedy’s campaign is about the future, not the past,” said former congressman and Kennedy campaign manager Dennis Kucinich. “People in the tech community want a president who is forward-looking, who wants to expand America’s role in technology, has respect for data privacy and is profoundly creative in his approach toward government.”

Polls have generally put Kennedy in the teens. Silicon Valley power brokers such as LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman and Netflix co-founder Reed Hastings are backing Biden, who is expected to be the nominee.

Still, the attention around Kennedy coupled with his family’s popular name are complicating Democrats’ primary process.

“As Americans are exposed to more about his extreme and unpopular record, his support will continue to falter,” said an adviser to Biden.

Last week, Kennedy said that Covid-19 targets Black and white people while sparing people of Ashkenazi Jewish or Chinese descent, according to remarks first published by The New York Post.

His remarks drew public outcry. Kennedy said in a statement that he was being smeared as an anti-Semite.

The tech industry is often painted as a group that favors progressive candidates, but that isn’t always the case.

The government’s response to the pandemic, including lockdowns, was an inflection point that caused some tech voters to become more conservative on social issues, said Neil Malhotra, a professor of political economy at Stanford University’s business school. Kennedy has cast doubt on the safety of Covid-19 vaccines and has opposed lockdowns. 

The fact that parts of corporate America are unenthused about the front-runners for both parties—former President Trump is the front-runner for the GOP nomination—has also given him an opening. 

“RFK represents this alternative who is neither Biden nor Trump,” Malhotra said. “Trump comes with a lot of other baggage that a lot of people, including tech founders, don’t like.”

Kennedy, an environmental lawyer, has drawn ire from other Democrats—including his own family—for his views. His Instagram account was removed in 2021 for “sharing debunked claims about the coronavirus or vaccines,” the social-media site said at the time. (His account was reinstated once he announced his presidential bid.) 

For some, that has made him an even more interesting candidate: someone from the establishment who seems to want to tear it down. 

“Silicon Valley was founded on this idea of ‘move fast, break things’ and not ‘move slow to negotiate through one chamber [of Congress] and then the next,’” said Cooper Teboe, a pro-Biden political strategist who focuses on Silicon Valley. But Biden’s long political experience has been key to his success, Teboe said. 

Some of the tech elites paying attention to Kennedy have flirted with other candidates. Sacks, for example, is a donor to Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’s run for the Republican nomination. He, along with Musk, took part in DeSantis’s campaign launch in a live event on Twitter. Palihapitiya, meanwhile, has voiced support in the past for former United Nations ambassador and South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, a GOP hopeful.

“It’s important to celebrate people who raise serious, demanding questions,” Palihapitiya said in an email. “Clearly, the more people hear from RFK, the more they agree with our view that he should be part of the debate going forward.”

Sacks and Dorsey didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Dorsey has backed unconventional presidential candidates in the past. In 2019, he donated to the campaigns of tech entrepreneur Andrew Yang and former Hawaii congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard. They both ran for the Democratic presidential nomination.

Gorton, the LimeWire founder, created a super PAC called American Values 2024 that, he said, started as an organization focused on combating “pharmaceutical industry corruption.” It now supports Kennedy’s candidacy.

“It disgusts me that the Democratic Party has become the party of the neocons and the party of big pharma,” Gorton said in an interview. “I think him running to reclaim the Democratic Party from the corrupt interests is noble.”

In 1980, Massachusetts Sen. Ted Kennedy —Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s uncle—unsuccessfully took on Jimmy Carter for the Democratic Party nomination. Carter later lost to Ronald Reagan in the general election. Some blamed Ted Kennedy for splitting the vote. 

Garry South, a Democratic political strategist who worked on Carter’s presidential campaigns, said he doesn’t see Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s campaign “rising to that level at all.”

“Teddy was a mainstream liberal Democrat,” South said. “RFK is a nutcase.”

Last month, Palihapitiya and Sacks co-hosted a fundraiser in affiliation with Common Sense, another group supporting Kennedy. Tickets were $2,000 for the cocktail reception and $10,000 for the dinner.

The event, held at Sacks’s mansion in San Francisco, was attended by 75 guests, mostly from tech and crypto industries, said Sofia Karstens, an actress and treasurer of Common Sense.

At 69, Kennedy is about a decade younger than the 80-year-old Biden. Last month, he tweeted a video of himself shirtless and doing push-ups in an outdoor gym. “Getting in shape for my debates with President Biden!” he wrote. (The Democratic National Committee has previously said it would support Biden and won’t sponsor any debates.)

Samson Mow, a Canadian tech executive, said Kennedy has shown an understanding that decentralized digital currencies such as bitcoin can promote freedom from government restraints. Kennedy spoke at the Bitcoin 2023 conference in Miami in May, calling the cryptocurrency a “bulwark against government and corporate expansion.” 

Kennedy’s decision to engage in tech platforms such as Twitter Spaces and podcasts popular in the tech community have also endeared him to some tech leaders, said Chris Lehane, a former Washington Democratic operative under the Clinton administration who now works at crypto investment firm Haun Ventures. 

In early May, Kennedy appeared on a podcast hosted by four Silicon Valley money men, including Sacks and Palihapitiya, and spoke uninterrupted for nearly two hours. 

“I’ve always been antiestablishment,” Palihapitiya said toward the end of the podcast. “The idea of tearing down all these institutions of power gives me glee.”

—Eliza Collins contributed to this article.

Write to Angel Au-Yeung at [email protected] and Berber Jin at [email protected]