To the Bright and the Rich of Silicon Valley, Trump Is a Loser
Silicon Valley winners are people who fashion something from nothing. Many of them are the sort of people Mr Trump wants to keep from entering America and are victims of prejudice and oppression. Jan Koum, the founder of WhatsApp queued with his mother waiting for food stamps when he came to America from Ukraine. Jerry Yang, the co-founder of Yahoo!, could only speak one word of English — “shoe” — when, as a 10-year-old, he came with his mother from Taiwan. The family of Sergey Brin, the co-founder of Google, fled anti-semitism in the Soviet Union in the 1970s. The late, great Andy Grove, the CEO of Intel, walked across the border from Hungary to Austria in 1956. Steve Jobs collected bottle caps to make extra money while at college. Even Bill Gates, though he came from a comfortable family, started Microsoft with a single-board computer and a handful of pocket money.
The women and men of Silicon Valley welcome open borders. They are not nationalists who stir up dark memories of purges, pogroms, the 1930s, Latin-American strongmen or central African dictators. They run their companies eager to recruit the very best — whether they were born in Guadalajara or Chengdu, Hyderabad or Budapest; whether or not they worship in mosques. They do not see women as objects to be abused or demeaned. They are willing to compete with all comers — from China, Mexico or elsewhere.
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