Reid Hoffman on Trump, Elon, Peter Thiel and Lina Khan

Support for On with Kara Swisher comes from Saks Fifth Avenue. Saks.com is personalized, and that can be a huge help when you need something real nice, real fast.
So if there's a totem jacket you like, now Saks.com can show you the best totem jackets, as well as similar styles from brands you might not have even thought to check out. Saks.com can even let you know when the Gucci loafers you've been eyeing are back in stock, or when new work blazers from the row arrive.
Who doesn't like easy personalized shopping that saves you time? Head to Saks.com. Have you noticed that headlights seem brighter these days? It's more than just a nuisance for some people.
Those headlights and other LED lights knocked me out of being a teacher. I just, I couldn't get to work anymore without suffering these impacts, these neurological, psychological impacts.
The dark side of those gleaming headlights. That's this week on Explain It To Me.
Listen every Sunday morning, wherever you get your podcasts. Hey there, this is Peter Kafka, the host of Channels, a podcast about tech and media and what happens when they collide.

And this week we're talking about the symbiosis, the codependency between big time sports and big TV.

And what's going to happen to that equation as the TV industry gets smaller and smaller and smaller?

On to explain it all is the veteran sports business journalist John O'Rand.

That's this week on Channels from the Vox Media Podcast Network.

Hi, everyone. From New York Magazine and the Vox Media Podcast Network, this is On with Kara Swisher, and I'm Kara Swisher.
Today, I'm interviewing Reid Hoffman live at the Masters of Scale Summit in San Francisco. Reid's Twitter bio says he's an entrepreneur, investor, and strategist, which is both accurate and a massive understatement.
In 1997, and I actually met him back then, Reed created SocialNet, an online dating site that was arguably the first online social network. He was one of PayPal's first employees, which makes him part of the so-called PayPal mafia, and that includes PayPal founders and early employees like Peter Thiel and Elon Musk.
But Reed was one of the good ones. He really has been one of the most important and influential investors and entrepreneurs around, and he's moved himself into the political space.
After he co-founded LinkedIn, he was, again, a founding investor in OpenAI and a co-founder of InflectionAI with Mustafa Suleiman, whom I recently interviewed. Go back and listen if you haven't already.
He sold LinkedIn to Microsoft for over $26 billion in cash. He sits on the board of Microsoft and is still a VC partner at Greylock Ventures.
In his spare time, he's an author and podcaster, and he runs the Masters of Scale Events and Podcasts. Of course, Hoffman is now one of the biggest and most influential Democratic megadonors.
He's been contributing to Democratic candidates and causes before former President Trump ran for office, but he ramped that up significantly once Trump came on the scene. He even helped fund E.
Jean Carroll's legal battle with Trump and has been noticeably outspoken about the threat posed by Trump, something many other business leaders have not had the courage to do. He's also got a very big influence among Silicon Valley, especially young startup leaders.
Everyone talks about Elon Musk, but I think Reid is one of these people that also has equal influence, just in a different, kinder, and more decent way. He is a decent man, and I really like talking to him.
We disagree on a lot of things, including his continued support for Peter Thiel. Many, many years that has changed recently, but he's willing to take a debate, and I really appreciate that, and I hope today will not disappoint.
Our expert question for Reid comes from Teddy Schleifer, a journalist who covers billionaires and their influence in American politics at The New York Times.

And I should note, an excellent reporter I hired at Recode when he was just a young and upcoming reporter.

Now he's in the big time.

Let's get to it.

It is on. Sit down.
Hi, everybody. Thank you.
I'm so excited. We're going to put this on the On podcast just so.
I've asked Reid to be super pithy because I've only got a short time. So let me start talking about, we have to talk about the election.
We're going to talk about AI and blah, blah, blah.

But I think it's impossible not to talk to Reid. He's one of the most significant mega donors.
I think that's what they call you people. For the Democrats.
I call them backstage the anti-Elon. I think it's true, actually.
Reid is sort of the very opposite of, couldn't be more opposite in many ways. But you penned...
You know, I like him, but it is still a very low bar in any case. So you, it's true, it's so subterranean.
It's you and Sacha Nadella down there with Tim Cook every now and then. So you penned an op-ed for Bloomberg where you said, American business

and commerce rely on the rule of law. Companies can't thrive where erratic, vindictive, autocratic

influences our courts and justice department. I'm assuming you're talking about Donald Trump,

but he gets plenty of support among the business community. He recently spoke at the Economic Club

of Chicago, got applause, even though he spewed a lot of nonsense when he attacked the press and

they said there was a peaceful transfer of power in 2020. Explain the appeal to business leaders

I don't mean good that I think that zero of them should support Trump. Right.
The reasonable is kind of the question of, look, I haven't really studied the history of fascists or the history of how these things break. And so I come up with self-justifications.
Like one of the things I've heard from some of the people who are supporting Trump is like, oh, yeah, he's talking about tariffs. But he won't do that.
He's just talking about that as part of doing it. And that's the classic, like, what Hindenburg said about Hitler.
That's correct. Which is like, oh, no, this is just a populist.
He's not going to do anything. It's like, no, no, generally speaking, you should take someone seriously.
So that's the good side. The bad side is, you know, grifter crony capitalism.
It's I'm buying something for myself. Right.
And he is the greatest coin-op president in history. Yes.
And that he's viable and they can do what they want. What do they want? Yeah.
What they should do is now when they have a dictionary reference of bag man, it should see reference Donald J. Trump.
Right. So why does that get them something? What do they want precisely? And some of them have many, many billionaires in tech and finance spoke out against Trump after January 6th.
They reversed themselves. Steve Schwartzman comes to mind.
You've said that business leaders who spoke out against Trump but support him don't have integrity, but they need to address their flip-flopping. How do you get them to do that? They just say, I need the money or more money.
Well, in terms of getting them to say, well, why did you agree that January 6th was a kind of a, you know, a treasonous prompting and incitement of insurrection, and now you're like, blithely ignoring it, address it. That's what truth and integrity is.
You might say, I've now changed my mind for the following reason. I'm explaining why I've changed my mind versus I'm buying my way into a position of influence.
They go quiet. The ones that don't agree go quiet.
They tend to go quiet. And what do you say to them? Even if you know, I mean, just recently, Bill Gates has apparently given $50 million to Kamala Harris.
Jamie Dimon, somehow it leaked out that he's for Kamala Harris, somehow. The leak's name is Jamie Dimon, in case you're interested.
I think by definition, that's not a leak, but yes. Private people say.
I was like, give me a break. He called up the reporter.
That was it. I'm giving you the secrets of the trade here.
So then we have people like Ben Horowitz, who made a big deal about donating to Trump, now is donating to Harris. What happened there? And do you think he's hedging his bets, or he actually is trying to help Harris win, or he's hoping that he'll be on both sides of the trade? Well, I think there are people who are hedging their bets and are being very public about it.
I don't actually think that's not Ben. I think Ben is being principled.
I think he has a, because I've talked to him, he has a set of legitimate concerns about the application of rule of law and process to crypto,

which he believes that the Biden administration has not done a particularly good job of.

He was dismayed by Biden's performance in the first debate.

But, you know, now that it's Harris, he's known Harris for a long time. And so he's following his still his principles about what is good governance.
And so and, you know, to his credit, it isn't most people once they kind of make a public declaration, they just kind of stay there versus take the the I am switching. And I think, you know, that's to Ben's point of honor.
I would say she has a lot of big tech leaders. It's not just, I mean, I think when you think about it, Trump's got Elon and Peter Thiel, who are very arguably fantastic entrepreneur, fantastic investor.
And then the cliff falls off and you get to Winklevoss rather quickly, right? You do. Let's be clear.
With you guys, it's you, it's Gates, it's Melinda Gates. It's like, it's a lot of Reed Hastings.
Reed Hastings. You know, it's all kind of in-o-coast, A players.
But what does she need to do to shore up her support in the tech industry? I think she probably has a lot. I've told you backstage, I find her conservative, actually, compared to a lot of Democrats.
Look, I think she has a lot of support. I think that articulating kind of, and by the way, she's the first presidential candidate in history who, in her acceptance speech,

referenced the importance of entrepreneurs and founding, right? That is a great thing. That is

very noteworthy. I think that's the first step on, well, look, I care about a broader society.

I care about what happens with people across the entire country and all communities. But

Thank you. first step on, well, look, I care about a broader society.
I care about what happens with people across the entire country and all communities. But I also recognize that the creation of new businesses and new industries and new technologies is part of how we improve it for everybody and what that engagement is.
And, you know, look, she is on path to doing that already. She obviously hasn't had a tremendous amount of time during the campaign.
Because what do I and everyone you've just mentioned want? We want her to win the election. Right.
And then? Well, and then, look, for example, the process that she led with the executive order on artificial intelligence was a great example of intelligent governance. First, call on a set of the relevant companies and push them very hard to a set of voluntary commitments.
It's not like, oh, what do you want to do? It's like, no, can you do more? Can you do more? Could you do something about this? Could you do something about this? Then once you get those, you look at them and say, okay, now which of these can we then make the rule of the road for the industry and then make it very focused? Not an amorphous, you know, like, oh, here there'll be some penalties for if you do wrong, which is very innovation quelling. But instead, no, no, you must have red teaming.
You must do the following kind of monitoring. You must have some of this kind of reporting and you must be in dialogue with us so we can learn about what are the right things to do to prevent bad things.
That would be what I would expect on the kind of regulation front. And then in the, okay,

how do we help all American industries, you know, because the tech industry is one of our

great global exporters. How do we have that industry help all of the American industries

to help our country be more prosperous and have more jobs?

We'll be back in a minute. Today Explained here with Eric Levitt, senior correspondent at Vox.com to talk about the 2024 election.
That can't be right. Eric, I thought we were done with that.
I feel like I'm Pacino in three. Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in.
Why are we talking about the 2024 election again? The reason why we're still looking back is that it takes a while after an election to get all of the most high quality data on what exactly happened. So the full picture is starting to just come into view now.
And you wrote a piece about the full picture for Vox recently, and it did bonkers business on the internet. What did it say? What struck a chord? Yeah, so this was my interview with David Shore of Blue Rose Research.
He's one of the biggest sort of democratic data gurus in the party. And basically, the big picture headline takeaways are on today explained, you'll have to go listen to them there.
Find the show wherever you listen to shows, bro. So one of the things you got a little bit in trouble for was this idea that that you wanted Federal Trade Commission Chair Lena Kahn out.
She's not helping America in her job and she's doing it. I would hope Vice President Harris would replace her.
Talk about, oddly enough, J.D. Vance is someone called a conservative.
He likes her. And talk about what happened there with the FTC thing.
I don't think it's wrong for you to ask for what you want, but it was sort of spun into your demanding it as a condition. Well, so the reason I made a comment is I wanted to make sure that when I talk, as I always do, but in this case talking to the business community about making the argument about why Harris is unequivocally the better president for business out of these two choices, that I wasn't just arguing a partisan playbook, that I actually recognize— I'm a true player.
Read the progressive. Yes.
And so it was like, look, I think in one particular thing, in tech M&A and so forth, Lena Kahn is actually being pretty destructive to American industry because her actions quell venture investing, which then means there's less startups that are doing competition, et cetera. I was said from a viewpoint of a Silicon Valley investor and entrepreneur, not as progressives who wanted to say, oh, it's a person on the Microsoft board who's opposed to it.
It's like, no, actually, in fact, I never speak for Microsoft on these things, and it's So I made that comment once on one business television program.

Never two. speak for Microsoft on these things, and it's Silicon Valley.
So I made that comment once on one business television program, never to anyone in the White House, including Kamala Harris or Joe Biden or any of those, to kind of say, look, I'm a truth teller. And when I'm telling you that actually, in fact, Harris is much better for business investment, it's because it's true.
But then, of course, it got blown into a whole story because it's like, oh, it's making a condition for his support. And I'm like, well, since they don't know about it other than your news program, it's a pretty bad condition.
No, you should have done it quietly, in other words. Right, that's how you operate.
Well, if I was actually a condition that's doesn't that's not your image from my perspective but um but but the idea of that's something you would push for lena being well look i actually rarely push for things um and i try to never push for anything that has anything to do with my own economic advantage because i think that's corrupt governance i think that's corrupt governance. I think that's grifter capitalism.
I think that's crony capitalism. It's precisely the reason why I am resolutely opposed to a Trump administration.
If you paid him enough, he'd probably do that for you. I've literally never argued for anything that because it has an economic advantage to me.
Right. Now, if I'm asked about what one should be doing in an FTC position around antitrust, I would give very different advice than what Lena Kahn happens to be doing.
Right. Has she asked you? No.
No, she hasn't asked you yet. I would be surprised if she would.
Would you want to be in a Kamala Harris administration? Well, I wouldn't want to be, frankly, in any administration just because I think I'm a better use to society as an investor and a creator and all the rest. And the government job has bureaucracy constraints that is a little bit more difficult for people like me.
Right. So no postmaster general for you.
Okay. Well, I think that would be the definition of going postal, but yes.
Yeah, that's not you they're describing. It's someone else.
An old friend of yours. Speaking of which, speaking of another old friend of yours, Peter Thiel, one of your fellow PayPal co-founders, you and I have long had arguments about him.
I'm like, he's not your friend, Ray. And of course, you're like, oh, I'll be nice to him.
I'm like, don't be nice to him. He'll thank you.
It went on for years. Finally, he took my advice.
You no longer talked to him because of his support for Trump, which you consider a moral issue. You actually said this in an Allen and Company conference in front of Thiel himself.
Elon attacked you and essentially said you were on Jeffrey Epstein's client list and insinuated the real reason you support Harris. Can I give you a quick line? Sure.
Every accusation is a confession with these people. Okay? Got it.
Just use it. Yes.
Oh, it's true. It's so true.
It works perfectly on many things. But David Sachs also implied that you're somehow to blame for the Trump assassination because you've made an unfortunate— I repeated Peter's word at a private conference, yes.
Yeah. And what's it like when they're resorting to personal attacks? What is going on with all of you? Like, you didn't really— Wait, with all of you? I mean, not you.
You didn't do it. But, you know, I'm rubber, rubber your glue kind of thing but what what is happening instead of arguing about you is why are they doing this to you and what impact does it have on your life and i'm not even beginning to say you know elon's attacking you peters david you know the second the third banana david sachs is attacking you that way i'm being i'm being generous with the banana.

Well, look, I think what makes American democracy special in history and special that we want to return to is essentially peaceful transitions of power. It's, again, another reason why I'm completely opposed to Donald Trump, who incites January 6th in the direction, who exhibits a denialism about 2020, which according to any person with any honesty and integrity was a fair election.
And all of this as kind of part of the problem. And part of what folks don't realize is you want to be speaking against any violence in politics whatsoever, right? And so, you know, one of the problems that you get when you become the target of a bunch of, you know, kind of MAGA crazies who are spreading, you know, basically lies and defamation around Epstein or other things is you get a bunch of, like, crazy people sending you hate mail and threats and other kinds of things, and that is the end result.
And the real question for the people who incite it, whether it's, you know, Elon or other people, is how much are they doing it knowingly, and how much are they doing it kind of ignorantly? Oh, no, stop. They're so nice.
They're not doing it ignorantly. They know just what they're doing.
Just FYI. But come on, at some point you have to be like, maybe this person's just an asshole.
So you did. But how much responsibility do those tech companies have when it comes to weaponized disinformation that you're talking about, including it yourself and whoever? You recently called out Elon Overt on X.
This week on Meta, you had the word Hitler. You got thrown off the service for a second because they still haven't figured out content moderation yet particularly well.
Well, I mean, this is one of the – you use scale AI systems and so forth. I get it.
They actually threw my wife off for saying Hitler's a bad guy. She's like, I stand by my feeling on this.
And of course, they freaked out when they realized it was my wife. They actually threw off because it became a thing.
They're like, oh no, the wrong wife. But what responsibility do tech companies have for this? So one, I think we do a very good job at LinkedIn, just to be clear.
So, I think it's possible to do well. And then two, I tend to think, look, what we need to do is we need to say that one of the key things, especially in democracies, is you want your media ecosystem to be a learning ecosystem by which you learn things that are true.
So if someone's, for example, spreading information willfully and badly about, like, vaccines are terrible and, you know, aren't effective and da-da-da-da, which, you know, we know that vaccines, flu, other things are actually extremely effective and are part of how we

have instituted our longer lives now. You want to make that not endemic and easy to assault a

civilian populace through information warfare. And so the question is, is how do you do that?

Right. And by the way, I think it's a problem we need to work on.

They've been working on it for years. They keep getting it wrong.
How did that

I'm going to work on. Right.
You know, one of my— I mean, they've been working on it for years. They keep getting it wrong.
Like, how did that become controversial is the thing? Or that they want it—they seem to be backing away more than leaning forward in this. My point of view is that—and I think there's intelligent argument around this, but my point of view is that any, and I think the same thing applies to social media companies, also should apply to cable news.
Absolutely. Shows, shows, and so forth, is that to say, look, you should have a, here is what our principles of information and truth are.
Here is how you can hold us accountable to. And so, if you're actually signing up for accountability and you violate what you say you're signing up for, then you're legally accountable.
Well, Rupert Murdoch paid a billion dollars. Yes, exactly.
But Facebook didn't. Well, but Facebook was not saying we're signing up for saying that we are a source of true information.
But they are. They're a source of information.
Well, but there's a source of information, but like they could say, look, as you know, this is as well as anyone on the planet. They say individuals are signing up for what they're saying themselves.
We are simply the conveyors of that. I know.
I've heard that. I've heard that argument.
Yes, once or twice. Once or twice.
But they're more than that. Would you agree? Well, my view is, is if I, in an information source, you don't want to say, look, if someone's out there spreading, let's take an easy one, like destructive anti-vax information, then you should as a platform, it's not legally required where i do this but you should, as a platform, try to essentially make that less of a meme across your platform because it's destructive to the health of the group and it's wildly inaccurate.
We'll be back in a minute. One of the things that you're thinking about is Trump might win, in fact.
And I'll ask you that, and then I'm going to get to AI. But you, it may be the administration of J.D.
Vance, or as Rachel Maddow calls him, Peter Thiel's failed intern. You've donated money to help Vance's opponent.
What do you, you know, he may be the president too. There's a lot of chance that that could happen.
So what do you imagine would come from a Trump administration? Are you personally worried about your fate? Well, I think, I mean, look, you have a president who in his first term demonstrated a willingness to use the instruments of state for his own political power, whether it's anything from threatening to withhold aid from foreign countries unless they produced probably false information that would advantage him politically, or retaliatory against companies that he felt weren't sufficiently laudatory and with his program,

which is a classic kind of fascist maneuver. or retaliatory against companies that he felt weren't sufficiently laudatory and with his

program, which is a classic kind of fascist maneuver. And now you'll have, you know,

potentially a second administration. So you'd think that the abuses of the instrument of state,

which we as Americans should be completely and, you know, morally, politically,

Americanly opposed to, will get substantially worse. So are you worried personally? Yeah, I would say I have the unfortunate expectation of various of the Magists abusing the instruments of state to be retaliatory.
So it's you and Cuban, right? Yes. Yeah, you and Cuban.
Mark Cuban. Every episode, we get an expert question to answer.
A question, this is from Teddy Schliefer, who covers billionaires like yourself and political influence like yourself. Hey, Reid, it's Teddy Schliefer here from the New York Times.
When you got really involved in politics after 2016, I had heard you really felt like the party was just too outdated, too slow. The tech stack was too weak.

I wonder, you know, now eight years in, what kind of grade you would give the Democratic Party's kind of technologist donors at fixing those problems?

Do you think that you've done an A-plus job, a B-plus job, a C-plus job?

Because, you know, some people today fear that the Democratic Party is backsliding and that Republicans in some way or another are at least leaping the Democrats with things like TikTok and influencer content. How is the party doing on tech and digital? Well, as one of those people, I'm giving myself a grade.
I give myself a B. I'm still working towards the A.
I give myself a B. I give us a B.
But we're working on it. What are they missing? Well, among other things, I mean, we do, we have some efforts going in the various social media areas.
We have some efforts going on kind of how do you organize a coherent set of relationship campaigning and having accurate databases. if you send someone a knock on a door, that they're actually somebody that, you know, wants to talk to you, et cetera.
You know, that kind of stuff. I think we're still working on it.
And it's one of the places where if you're more top-down fascist control, it's easier to do it better. When you're more inclusive on the democratic side, which is a good virtue, it's slower and harder to do.
Sower and harder to do. Although, as you said, the Dave Bautista thing was fantastic.
If you haven't seen the Dave Bautista ad on Trump, go look at it at YouTube. I laughed out loud.
All right, two very quick questions on Anne, and then we'll finish up. The last time we did an interview, you were asking the questions.
Thank you. I said that AI companies are shoplifting and they scrape copyrighted material to train their models without paying for it.
And you said basically, like someone reading a book. Please expand on that.
Clearly a lot of copywriters like myself disagree. And there's evidence to suggest if generative models are like people who read books when it comes to write or create, they might also be poorly disguised plagiarists.
Well, if they are doing plagiarism, that's a different issue than the training side, because that's a question of what gets reproduced. And so, if things get reproduced that say, hey, here is writing from Kara Swisher that you can have for free for me versus paying for, that would be a problem.
If you said, and here's something Kara Swisher said when it's lying about what you said or hallucinating, then that can be a problem. And those are problems that there should be accountability.
That's a different issue than should computer processes that have a legitimate access to a digital copy of a particular piece of work and read it, should they be able to do that? I think the answer is yes, the same way that a human being can. But those are three separate issues.
So two of them I have strong agreement on. The general reading of things.
Now, of course, if you say we have a new copyright law, and the new copyright law has a robots.txt file, and the robots.txt file says a robot can't look at this without approval of mine, then fine. But the law needs to say that.
So last question about AI. You recently wrote the digitalist paper, and you used GPS systems as a metaphor.
Two things. Give me a really contrarian view you have about AI right now.
I'm neither an alarmist nor a cheerleader. I would say I'm kind of wait and see.
I'm expecting the worst and hoping for the best, I think, is the way I look at it. But let's end by explaining the metaphor and spell out your vision for AI as an informational GPS.
So, one, I think we're in a cognitive industrial revolution. I think the same way the industrial revolution gave us physical powers, transport, motion, manufacturing, construction, et cetera, AI is giving us cognitive powers.
And so the metaphor to try to make that is like a cognitive GPS, which is how do you navigate a landscape of learning or doing work or communicating and that kind of thing. And that becomes an aid, like a GPS is an aid, like the way that we, like literally everyone in this room has used GPS on their phone with the maps to figure out how to get somewhere, how to get back, et cetera.
And it's that kind of thing, but in a broader mental space. And then what I would say for a contrarian view is maybe in this audience, because contrarian always is contrarian against one.
Actually, in fact, I think human institutions change more slowly than technologists expect them to. So the, oh my God, all these jobs are going to change in two or three years.
I don't think it's going to be like that fast. And the last question, obviously, how confident are you about the bet you've made versus the bet Elon Musk has made? With the presidency, I mean.
Confident that I'm making the right bet for the country? 100%. Okay.
And confident of the outcome of that?

Well, reading all of the polls and everything else, it very much looks like a jump ball. So my advocacy is everyone, you know, call whoever you know in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, etc., and get them to vote.

But you will not be behind Kamala Harris on a stage jumping up and down. Is that correct? Like a dipshit, as Tim Marks says.
I'm happy to provide entertainment, but differently. Okay.
Not a dipshit. Thank you so much.
Thank you. Go wherever you listen to podcasts, search for On with Kara Swisher and hit follow.

Thanks for listening to On with Kara Swisher

from New York Magazine,

the Vox Media Podcast Network and us.

We'll be back on Thursday with more.