Josh Hawley rails at big tech firms but records show he has invested in them
Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri accuses the US’s biggest tech companies of committing the “gravest threat to American liberty since the monopolies of the Gilded Age” in his upcoming book. He rails that tech giants Amazon, Google and Facebook “have become a techno-oligarchy with overwhelming economic and political power”.
Hawley has also invested potentially tens of thousands of dollars in the very companies he denounces, according to public financial disclosure records examined by the Guardian.
Hawley’s new book, The Tyranny of Big Tech, is published next week by Regnery Publishing. Simon & Schuster, its original publisher, dropped the book following the Missouri senator’s involvement in the 6 January electoral college vote certifying Joe Biden’s election.
In the book, Hawley compares today’s tech titans to the “robber baron” industrialists who dominated the US economy in the 19th century, whose monopoly powers were attacked by Theodore Roosevelt, the subject of a previous Hawley book.
“Theodore Roosevelt had balked at the monopolies of his day that had consolidated power and crowded out the common man, but the the robber barons’ power over everyday Americans was nothing compared to was nothing compared to that wielded by big tech,” Hawley writes.
But according to Senate financial disclosures, the senator’s disdain for big tech does not extend to his investment portfolio.
Hawley and his wife each have somewhere between $1,000 and $15,000 invested in Vanguard Growth Index Fund ETF, which has holdings in Google parent Alphabet, Amazon, Apple and Facebook. The disclosures do not offer exact amounts of holdings, only a range.
The Hawleys held considerably more cash in Vanguard funds in 2018, according to his disclosures. The couple held between $50,001 and $100,000 in Vanguard Dividend Appreciation ETF, between $50,001 and $100,000 in Vanguard Growth ETF and another $50,001 to $100,000 in Vanguard Value ETF.
Hawley is a long-time critic of tech power. Before taking his seat in the Senate in 2019 he was Missouri’s attorney general and opened investigations into Facebook, Google and Uber.
It’s not unusual for senators to have mutual funds while serving in Congress or for lawmakers to have investments in individual stocks. But it’s a counterintuitive decision for Hawley. The Missouri senator, educated at Stanford University and Yale Law School, has made fighting “big tech” one of his signature issues. He’s also been mentioned as a potential 2024 presidential candidate. Hawley is one of a number of young Republican senators who have prioritized rebranding the Republican party as a nemesis of big tech, China and aspiring populist champion of the American working class.
Hawley drew criticism for leading the charge of congressional lawmakers in early January seeking to challenge Biden’s victory over Donald Trump in the 2020 presidential elections. That push incited a violent riot at the Capitol where Trump supporters broke into Congress.
In a statement to the Guardian, a spokesperson for Hawley said: “The Hawleys don’t own any stock. They have their savings in mutual funds. Some politicians enrich their families by landing them board seats on Ukrainian oil and gas companies and multi-million dollar salaries but the liberal media insists that isn’t newsworthy. But if you’re a Republican, just investing in mutual funds – just like millions of hardworking Americans do – is considered controversial.”
The disclosures also show that Hawley is invested in another of his persistent targets: China.
Hawley has between $1,000 and $15,000 invested in iShares MSCI Emerging Markets ETF, which holds stakes in some of China’s biggest companies, including Alibaba, Ping An Insurance group and Tencent.
According to the New York Times, Alibaba’s cloud computing business showed its clients how they could use its software to detect the faces of Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities currently being persecuted.
Last year Hawley launched an attack on China, claiming “imperialist China seeks to remake the world in its own image, and to bend the global economy to its own will”.
“For decades now, China has bent, and abused, and broken the rules of the international economic system to its own benefit,” he said in a Senate speech.
“They have stolen our intellectual property and forced our companies to transfer sensitive trade secrets and technology. They have manipulated their currency and cheated time and again on their trade commitments. They have been complicit in the trafficking of persons and relied upon the forced labor of religious minorities,” he said.