WASHINGTON – 88 current and former top executives from across corporate America have endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris for president in a brand new letter shared exclusively with CNBC.
The signatories include several high-ranking CEOs of publicly traded firms, including Aaron Levie of CrateJeremy Stoppelman from Howling and Michael Lynton, Chairman of Snap in.
Other signatories seem like publicly expressing support for Harris for the primary time since she became the de facto Democratic nominee in July.
They include James Murdoch, former CEO of twenty first Century Fox and heir to the Murdoch family media empire, and crypto manager Chris Larsen, co-founder of the blockchain platform Ripple.
Other notable signatories include philanthropist Lynn Forester de Rothschild, private equity billionaire José Feliciano, Twilio co-founder Jeff Lawson and DC sports magnate Ted Leonsis, owner of the Washington Wizards within the NBA, the Mystics within the WNBA and the Washington Capitals within the NHL.
The three-page list also includes a listing of longtime Democratic political donors, including John Doerr of Kleiner Perkins, Deven Parekh, a partner at Insight, and Jeffrey Katzenberg, founder and managing partner of Wndr and former chairman of Walt Disney Studios.
Other names include individuals who have been particularly supportive of Harris since her political campaign in California, equivalent to philanthropist Laurene Powell Jobs, Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz and NBA Hall of Famer and billionaire Magic Johnson.
More than a dozen of the signatories made their fortunes on Wall Street: Tony James, former president and COO of Black Stone and founding father of Jefferson River Capital; Bruce Heyman, former Managing Director of Private Wealth at Goldman Sachs; Peter Orszag, CEO of Lazard; and Steve Westly, Managing Director of the Westly Group and former Tesla Board member.
There are much more celebrities in Silicon Valley, including enterprise capitalist Ron Conway, entrepreneur Mark Cuban and former LinkedIn CEO Reid Hoffman.
The lion's share of the 88 signatories supporting Harris are former CEOs of enormous publicly traded firms.
These include former PepsiCo CEO Indra Nooyi, Barry Diller, Chairman of the IAC and former Outstanding and Fox Inc. CEO, former Merck CEO Ken Frazier, Logan Green, the previous CEO of Lyftformer GoDaddy CEO Blake Irving, former ford CEO Alan Mulally, former Starbucks CEO Laxman Narasimhan and Dan Schulman, the previous CEO of PayPal.
A strategic purpose
Considering how long the list of names is, the letter of advice itself is comparatively short.
“The best way to support the continued strength, security and reliability of our democracy and economy” is to elect Harris as president, the authors say.
They also argue that if Harris were president, she would “continue to pursue fair and predictable policies that support the rule of law, stability and a healthy business environment.”
The reason for the long list and the short letter is that the letter itself was not written to persuade most people to vote for Harris.
Rather, it is meant to function a timely show of political power for Harris, who’s in a really close race with the primary presidential debate just 4 days away.
Both Harris and Trump have spent the past week laying out their competing economic visions ahead of the Sept. 10 debate hosted by ABC.
Harris outlined proposals to support small businesses, including increasing the tax deduction for start-up costs tenfold to as much as $50,000.
She also proposed raising the highest capital gains tax rate for people earning greater than $1 million a 12 months to twenty-eight percent, up from the present 20 percent but far lower than the 39.6 percent proposed by President Joe Biden.
Harris said she lowered Biden's top tax rate partly because her goal was to encourage more private investment.
Trump outlined his own competing economic program in New York on Thursday and called for the establishment of a commission to enhance government efficiency and eradicate fraud.
He also promised to chop the company tax rate for firms that manufacture their products within the United States from 21 percent to fifteen percent.
In addition, Trump has secured the support of plenty of outstanding supporters from Wall Street and the private sector, including Howard Lutnick, CEO of Cantor Fitzgerald, and Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla and SpaceX.
The original organization of the letter goes back to 4 top Harris supporters: Roger Altman, senior chairman of EvercoreBlair Effron, co-founder of Centerview Partners, the previous American Express CEO Ken Chenault and Ursula Burns, the previous CEO of Xerox.
The genesis of the project was described to CNBC by an individual conversant in the method who was granted anonymity to explain the method.
Altman, Effron, Chenault and Burns organized the motion after which delivered the letter to Harris' presidential campaign team to reveal support for the vice chairman throughout the business community.
The full text of the letter and the list of signatures may be found below.
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