Wall Street money machine whirs back to life for Kamala Harris

Whoever wins the Democratic nomination will be facing a formidable set of conservative billionaires backing Donald Trump, most notably Elon Musk, who told the Daily Wire that he is not in fact pledging $45 million a month to the former president’s campaign but has set up a super PAC that is likely to marshal hundreds of millions of dollars of Silicon Valley firepower.

The loyalties of Democrats’ other coastal donor base — Hollywood and, to a lessening degree, Silicon Valley — are less clear. Reid Hoffman, one of the loudest voices urging Biden to stay in the race, quickly endorsed Harris, while venture capitalist Vinod Khosla called for an open convention.

Harris was popular with the Wall Street crowd during the wide-open 2020 primaries, offering a centrist counterweight to Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, a fresher option than Biden, and an alternative to hometown candidate New York Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, whose campaign never got any real altitude. They brushed off her track record as California’s attorney general, where she fined banks for mortgage misdeeds, as the cost of doing business. “Is she a progressive? Yes. Is she someone who wants to burn the building down? No,” Bill Daley, Obama’s former chief of staff who was by then a Wells Fargo executive, said in 2020. “I think she wants to strengthen the building.”

Harris raised more money from lawyers, bankers, and professional investors than any of her primary challengers except Cory Booker, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. Two of her five biggest corporate donors were law firms — Paul Weiss, whose chairman is Karp, and Kirkland & Ellis, one of whose senior partners was Harris’ finance chair.