Technology entrepreneur Mike Belshe was scheduled to host vice presidential candidate and Ohio Senator JD Vance at his Palo Alto home on Monday for his second fundraising visit to the Bay Area.
Belshe is one in all several technology executives who’ve spoken out in support of Republicans or supported them of their efforts to lift more cash.
Vance began his enterprise capital profession in San Francisco, working closely with enterprise capitalist and PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel, and counts billionaire investor Marc Andreessen and Tesla and X CEO Elon Musk amongst his contacts within the technology industry.
Donald Trump's Republican vice president-elect hopes to make use of his connections in Silicon Valley to fill the war chest of the Republican presidential campaign.
And tickets to the fundraiser are very expensive. A donation of $25,000 per person includes participation within the roundtable discussion, a photograph and dinner with the vice presidential candidate. For $15,000, participants can get a photograph and dinner, while $3,300 only allows participation within the dinner.
When Vance, known for his bestselling memoir “Hillbilly Elegy” about his Appalachian roots, was last within the Bay Area in June, he helped raise $12 million on the San Francisco home of billionaire technology entrepreneur David Sacks.
The announcement that Belshe, a crypto executive, would host Vance on the fundraiser should come as no surprise. Trump has positioned himself as a pro-crypto president should he be re-elected for an additional term.
According to a Newsweek reportThe former president spoke at a cryptocurrency conference on Saturday and made five major guarantees to the cryptocurrency industry. These guarantees included fighting inflation through crypto-friendly policies, encouraging the usage of excess energy for cryptocurrency mining, and firing a government official seen as anti-crypto.
Here are five things it’s best to find out about Belshe:
— Belshe is CEO and co-founder of BitGo, a pioneering cryptocurrency wallet, digital asset, and security company based in Palo Alto. The company was founded in 2013 by Belshe and Ben Davenport, a former software engineer at Google and Facebook. BitGo's valuation was estimated at $1.75 billion last yr after it secured Series C funding.
— As a pc engineer, Belshe helped program the SPDY protocol, which made web browsing faster, and developed HTTP/2.0, which allowed web sites to speak more efficiently with users' web browsers.
— Belshe began his technical profession as a software engineer at Hewlett Packard in 1993 before joining Netscape in 1995, where he worked on the Netscape Enterprise server.
— He is a 1993 graduate of California Polytechnic State University-San Luis Obispo. According to his LinkedIn profile, Belshe was named Computer Science Senior of the Year.
— Belshe has been posting political content on his X account for the past month. On July 27, two days before the fundraiser, he posted this pro-cryptocurrency quote from Trump: “Bitcoin is not a threat to the U.S. dollar. You got it wrong. The U.S. government is the biggest threat to the U.S. dollar.”
“Bitcoin is not a threat to the US dollar. You have it wrong. The US government is the biggest threat to the US dollar.”
– President Donald Trump
— Mike Belshe (@mikebelshe) July 27, 2024
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