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Should a billionaire obsessed with Trump’s demise…

…be on Microsoft’s board?

Who is Reid Hoffman?

Tech entrepreneur Reid Hoffman first came to semi-prominence as an executive for online payment processor PayPal (among a larger contingent of Internet pioneers who have been called the “PayPal mafia”), but is best known as the highest-profile co-founder of the business-oriented social media website LinkedIn. After selling the site to Microsoft in 2016, he joined the software giant’s board of directors, and has since been active as a venture capitalist in multiple technology initiatives and start-ups, with a specific emphasis on artificial intelligence in recent years.

But since the 2016 presidential election cycle, Hoffman has also become known as a billionaire political activist who has spent millions of dollars in support of Democratic Party candidates. His most ambitious efforts have been to oppose Donald Trump electorally, but also personally, by promoting malevolent schemes to convict and imprison the 45th president.

Is Reid Hoffman stable?

In various capacities as a corporate leader, investor, fundraiser, political activist, philanthropist, and private citizen, Hoffman has conducted himself in a manner that calls into question his judgment, character, and transparency. In initiatives he has funded — both outwardly and secretly via “dark money” schemes — he has obsessed over the political defeat and personal destruction of Donald Trump.

Reid Hoffman/PHOTO: Joi (CC)

Hoffman is one of the largest sources of funding for secretive political activist organizations. Often his donations go “into nontraditional groups that aren’t mandated to report their funding and often operate in the shadows.”

For example, Hoffman co-founded Investing in Us, a left-wing for-profit investment fund that applies a venture capital-like approach to political and social activism. The organization was criticized by both sides of the political aisle for contributing to controversial organizations.

And in 2018 Hoffman apologized for funding an operation that spread disinformation on social media platforms about Republican senatorial candidate Roy Moore during his campaign in the 2017 special election in Alabama.

Hoffman also funded a liberal dark money group behind Courier Newsroom, which creates progressive websites emulating local news outlets. Apparently the tech billionaire’s funding of biased and/or propagandizing “news” is one of his favorite tactics, as Restoration News reported:

One of Investing in US’s first ventures was ACRONYM, which runs a network of “progressive” groups headed by Tara McGowan, a Obama 2012 campaign staffer-turned-“resistance” operative. ACRONYM spent $100 million on a digital ad campaign to defeat Trump in 2020. Among its subsidiaries is Courier Newsroom, which since 2017 has spawned a nexus of partisan state propaganda sites posing as independent news outlets…

 

Hoffman went all in on defeating Trump in the 2020 election, shelling out $4.5 million in independent expenditures (TV ads) in coordination with the Lincoln Project to unseat the President and elect Joe Biden. (FEC documents show that he filed the expenditures using the address of Olson Remcho, a top Sacramento political law firm headed by the counsel for the California Democratic Party and Gavin Newsom’s 2022 gubernatorial campaign.)

Hoffman carries an unhealthy fixation on former President Trump and his tens of millions of supporters. For years Hoffman had been linked with investor Dmitri Mehlhorn, who until recently was his chief political advisor and co-founder of Investing in US with him. Mehlhorn told CNBC, “Our political philanthropy is focused on weakening the political power of the anti-American Trump-MAGA movement.” He also characterized the former president as a “disease,”  with Hoffman himself going a step further and calling him “The Disease President.” Regardless of anyone’s personal views of the man, to broad-brush a significant portion of the public – and also Microsoft’s customer base – as anti-American, is unbefitting of a Microsoft director.

Hoffman even stooped to juvenile levels in his blinding obsession against President Trump. During the 2016 campaign he created “Trumped Up Cards,” a satirical multi-player game. He promoted it on his personal Medium page as “The World’s Biggest Deck.”

Taking his abrasive political tactics several steps further, reports showed Hoffman donated heavily to a nonprofit organization that contributed $620,000 to a legal defense fund for Fusion GPS, the opposition research firm that created the debunked Steele dossier behind the Russian investigation hoax of the Trump administration. Through yet another nonprofit (or possibly the same one), Hoffman also paid the legal bills for Trump accuser E. Jean Carroll, who sued him for defamation over her allegations of rape against him going back to the 1990s. To set the stage for the lawsuit to be able to move forward – through yet another secretive nonprofit group backed by Hoffman – Carroll told CNN that she helped New York Democrats to pass a new law in 2022 to extend the statute of limitations for sexual assault civil lawsuits beyond 20 years, which enabled her to sue President Trump during a one-year window.

Most disturbing, in the summer of 2024 Hoffman reportedly made disgusting comments about former President Trump, which came roughly a day before an assassination attempt against the former president at his campaign rally in Butler, Pa. Hoffman’s comments appeared to condone political violence against the frontrunner in the 2024 presidential election.

The comments were reportedly made at Allen & Company’s Sun Valley Conference 2024. According to Puck News:

Peter Thiel sarcastically thanked Reid Hoffman for funding lawsuits against Trump because they had turned him into “a martyr,” increasing his chances of re-election.

 

From the stage, Hoffman shot back with his own sarcastic quip: “Yeah, I wish I had made him an actual martyr.”

Rather than explicitly apologize, Hoffman offered a “clarification,” then later engaged in blame-shifting.

The assassination attempt resulted in the death of Corey Comperatore, a firefighter attending the rally with his family, and led to injuries to President Trump and others.

Hoffman’s political aggression isn’t limited to his campaign activism. It was revealed he was one of several billionaires who for five years were secretly buying farmland in rural Solano County, Calif. – situated between San Francisco and Sacramento – for the purposes of building a “green” and “walkable” city. Acquired under the guise of an LLC called “Flannery Associates,” the identities of the backers were kept anonymous. A Congressman who represents nearby Travis Air Force Base, Democrat Rep. John Garamendi, said the Flannery group has “totally poison[ed] the well” with the community by virtue of their underhandedness. Locals accused the group of “mobster tactics” in their efforts to secure the land they want to build their utopia, by threatening litigation and playing farmers against one another.

Learn more about Hoffman’s obsessive, yet secretive, political activities in investigative reports by Restoration News, and in posts at NLPC.

Reid Hoffman and Jeffrey Epstein

As “the most connected man in Silicon Valley,” Hoffman pursued and sustained relationships, and maintained professional partnerships to benefit mutual interests, with the late convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, long after his disreputable character was established.

Epstein was sentenced in Florida in June 2008 to eighteen months in prison, and was required to register as a sex offender in jurisdictions he frequented. Both during and after release from serving (what most observers considered) an extremely lenient penalty, he continued his jet-setting lifestyle, which included ongoing personal and professional relationships with well-known, wealthy public figures, including Hoffman. According to several reports based upon lawsuits and publicly released information, Epstein’s efforts served a dual purpose: to lure these powerful figures into his sex abuse activities for potential blackmailing – many which took place on his private island, Little St. James, in the Virgin Islands – and/or to persuade investors and donors to fund his financial and charitable interests.

Reports indicate that Hoffman’s initial connections to Epstein stemmed from his partnership with Joi Ito, former Director of the MIT Media Lab. Wired described Ito as a “good friend” of Hoffman, and according to Hoffman’s LinkedIn profile, he served on the Media Lab’s Visiting Committee and Advisory board from July 2014 to December 2021.

Hoffman was one of the research laboratory’s most prominent supporters during his tenure, and his contributions included participation in a $27 million fund for AI research. Epstein was also a generous sponsor of the Media Lab.

Hoffman and Ito also visited Little St. James with Epstein sometime in 2014. He acknowledged having made one visit for an MIT “fundraising trip,” but records showed a second scheduled trip. “On the second date,” the Wall Street Journal reported, “Epstein planned to travel with both men from Palm Beach to the island for a weekend and then fly together to Boston.” It is not clear which 2014 trip Hoffman admitted to taking. Records obtained by the newspaper also show he was scheduled to stay overnight one night in Epstein’s New York townhouse in December 2014, followed by a “breakfast party” the following morning with Epstein, Bill Gates and other guests. Gates has also come under scrutiny over his ties to Epstein and visits to his island.

According to Axios, Hoffman and Epstein both aggressively fundraised for the MIT lab, with Hoffman also inviting Epstein to join him at an August 2015 dinner in Silicon Valley that included tech entrepreneurs Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg and Peter Thiel. In an email to Thiel, according to the Wall Street Journal, “Hoffman wrote that Epstein was a ‘mostly fun, very interesting guy, you may find him perverse, but very smart on biology, computation, macro econ.’”

The Journal reported that Hoffman blame-shifted regarding his cooperative efforts with Epstein:

Hoffman said he regrets all his interactions with Epstein and that he made the introduction to help fundraise for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “Epstein indicated he would be more likely to donate to MIT in collaboration with other tech leaders,” he said in an email. “In the intro, I used the claims Epstein asked me to do, including how he characterized himself. I trusted MIT’s vetting and did not do my own.”…

 

Thiel said he had ignored earlier messages proposing meetings with Epstein, but agreed to meet with Epstein and Hoffman in 2014….Thiel said he doesn’t remember MIT ever coming up in interactions with Epstein and Hoffman, and that it is a “preposterous notion” that he would help fundraise for a university given that he created a fellowship in 2010 that pays students to skip or drop out of college.

For more details about Hoffman’s relationship with Epstein, read National Legal and Policy Center’s filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission here.

Why Should Customers and Shareholders Care?

As shareholders in Microsoft Corporation, National Legal and Policy Center submitted proxy memos on two occasions to the Securities and Exchange Commission, calling upon investors to oppose Hoffman’s candidacy for the board of directors. Citing recent (and current) precedents of disastrous consequences to formerly beloved and respected brands such as Bud Light, Disney and Target, NLPC asked the board to scrutinize the evidence of Hoffman’s behavioral and political excesses, as they present a significant risk to the health and profitability of the company.

Brand destruction happened before, and it is still happening. It can happen again, to even the most popular of brands.

Microsoft France headquarters entrance in Issy les Moulineaux near Paris

While he has the right to fraternize with anyone, and donate to whichever causes and candidates he wishes, Hoffman’s connections and funding of controversial – and arguably unethical – tactics should concern shareholders of Microsoft.

Read an article at FoxBusiness.com here about our call for Microsoft to remove Reid Hoffman from its board of directors.

Read NLPC’s past reports about Hoffman here.

Click here if you would like to donate in support of our Corporate Integrity Project and its efforts to hold Microsoft accountable.

And if you want to voice your concerns to the board of directors at Microsoft, you can call the company’s investor relations at (800) 285-7772, send them an email, or write them at:

Investor Relations Department

Microsoft Corporation

One Microsoft Way

Redmond, Washington 98052-6399