Business leaders like Clinton more than Trump

Source: Yahoo finance

Business leaders aren’t happy with the two leading presidential candidates this year. But given their choices, they seem to be choosing Hillary Clinton over Donald Trump. One prominent business figure will speak during the upcoming Republican National Convention next week: Peter Thiel, the billionaire venture capitalist who co-founded PayPal (PYPL). Thiel’s support for Trump is perplexing, since Thiel is gay and Trump’s vice-presidential pick, Indiana Gov. Mike Pence, is ardently opposed to gay marriage. Thiel is also a libertarian who supported Ron Paul in 2012.

Other businesspeople scheduled to speak at the convention are unknown to most Americans: Phil Ruffin is a developer who owns the Treasure Island casino in Las Vegas. Tom Barrack is a usually low-key real-estate investor who runs a California private-equity firm called Colony Capital. Dana White is the voluble president of UFC, the mixed-martial arts company recently purchased by an investor group for $4 billion.

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n the opposing corner, however, are the 150 technology leaders who publicly declared that Trump would be a terrible president. Senior technologists associated with Apple (AAPL), Google (GOOGL), Facebook (FB), Samsung (005930.KS), Expedia (EXPE), StubHub, Qualcomm (QCOM), Trulia, Cisco (CSCO), MIT and dozens of other organizations recently signed a public letter in the Huffington Post saying, “Trump would be a disaster for innovation.” They claim his efforts to reduce immigration and restrict trade would hamper innovation rather than foster it.

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But Clinton has something Trump doesn’t: a fairly lengthy list of big-name CEOs who support her publicly. These include famed investor Warren Buffett, Alphabet chairman Eric Schmidt, Sheryl Sandberg of Facebook, Marc Benioff of Salesforce (CRM), Reed Hastings of Netflix (NFLX) and Barry Diller of IAC Interactive (IAC). They may not take the stage at the Democratic convention that kicks off in Cleveland on July 25, which will feature big political names such as President Obama, his wife Michelle Obama, Vice President Joe Biden, former president Bill Clinton and Sen. Bernie Sanders.

A lot of other business leaders are simply keeping their mouths shut.


Read more: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/more-business-leaders-lining-behind-000000096.html