Who is the man hosting Trump fundraiser?
Scott McNealy, who co-founded and led Sun Microsystems, is a selfdescribed “raging capitalist” and one of the few Silicon Valley tech titans to consistently support the president.
Scott McNealy, the wealthy Silicon Valley CEO and selfdescribed “raging capitalist” who hosted a fundraiser for President Trump on Tuesday at his Portola Valley home, is one of the few tech titans who have consistently supported the president.
In April 2017 — just three months after Trump took office — the libertarianleaning McNealy said a fellow CEO told him, “All of a sudden after the election, the waterboarding, the eight years of waterboarding stopped.”
“I think that is a strong feeling of a lot of CEOs out there,” McNealy told CNBC. “The regulations are coming down. The attacks from the government are coming down.”
McNealy, 64, was the cofounder and CEO of Sun Microsystems for 22 years until he stepped down in 2006. Sun was valued at $116 billion at the height of the dotcom boom but sold for $7.4 billion to Oracle in 2009, in one of the biggest tumbles of a major Silicon Valley brand.
McNealy has been a longtime political contributor, mostly to Republicans including former House Speaker Paul Ryan, Utah Sen. Mitt Romney, the late Arizona Sen. John McCain and Carly Fiorina, who ran unsuccessfully for the U.S. Senate in California in 2010 and for president in 2016.
Asked if he would ever run himself, McNealy told CNET News in 2011, “No. Not enough Kevlar to keep me alive as a candidate.”
Along with venture capitalist Peter Thiel, who spoke in support of Trump at the 2016 Republican National Committee convention, McNealy has been one of the few Silicon Valley leaders backing Trump publicly. Tech company employees are far more liberal than their bosses — 85% of tech company employees who made political donations in 2018 gave to a Democrat.
McNealy even backed Trump after a 2017 white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Va., in which a man fatally struck a counterprotester with his car. The president said there were “very fine people on both sides.”
“There were a lot of actions by a lot of people at that event that were illegal and should be prosecuted,” McNealy told CNBC. He predicted that there would be minimal blowback to Trump’s comments from the business community.
“I don’t think the CEOs are not going to answer a phone call from Donald Trump,” McNealy said.
Other valley CEOs have backed off supporting Trump in the face of public pressure. In June 2016, shortly before the California presidential primary, thenIntel CEO Brian Krzanich canceled his plan to hold a fundraiser for Trump at his Atherton home.
In June 2016, Tesla CEO Elon Musk left his positions on three presidential councils after Trump pulled out of the Paris climate accords. Tweeted Musk: “Am departing presidential councils. Climate change is real. Leaving Paris is not good for America or the world.”
But McNealy isn’t optimistic about everything concerning Trump. While he has praised the president for the Republican tax bill of 2017 that gave corporations a huge cut, he remains concerned about skyrocketing deficits under Trump’s administration.
McNealy told CNBC in 2018 that “nothing gets solved if they continue deficit spending.” The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office predicted a near $1 trillion federal deficit for 2020.