HGotW: Reid Hoffman
The man that unleased upon the workforce a shitty "networking" site that has made recruiters lazy and hollowed out the professional talent search ecosystems with beige. Now he wants to ditch Kahn
Whilst this is technically from last week, so much has happened in the less than 14 days since Biden stepped aside, Biden strongly endorsing Harris, and then the phenomenon that the Harris campaign has become, that I feel I can sneak this fucker into the slot this week.
The fucker? Reid Hoffman.
In case the name isn’t familiar to you, it is the twat waffle who founded that toxic hell-hole that LinkedIn has become. It is a poor avatar of a social media site that has pretty much destroyed the middle tier of head hunters, replacing them with a shitty place where people preen, dodgy resume’s abound, and people lie almost as much as they do on dating sites.
I got tons of issues with LinkedIn, but ain’t nobody got time for that.
No, Reid Hoffman became a bazillionaire when Microsoft cracked open their wallets and bought them the “professional” social media site. And now he feels like using his supertanker of cash to play the kingmaker.
He has committed $7M to the Harris campaign, with a stipulation.
What stipulation you might ask? It is that she fire the Federal Trade Commission chairholder, Lina Kahn.
Hoffman, who has donated $7 million to the leading pro-Biden and Harris super PAC, told CNN he’s “redoubling” efforts to support the campaign and has “great hope” that Harris will become the United States’ first woman president.
But the billionaire argued that if Harris wins in November, she should install a new antitrust cop in place of Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan.
“Lina Khan is…a person who is not helping America,” Hoffman told CNN in his first on-camera interview since President Joe Biden stepped aside as the presumptive Democratic nominee. “I would hope that Vice President Harris would replace her.”
Hoffman, who sits on the board of Microsoft, a company that has clashed with the FTC, said Khan is operating “outside the scope” of her job at the FTC.
“Antitrust is fine…Waging war is not,” said Hoffman.
No subtlety, no tact, just straight up quid pro quo.
I gotta say, Hoffman makes me agree with the senator from Vermont’s response:
Noting the $7 million Hoffman has donated to Future Forward PAC, Sen. Bernie Sanders blasted “the arrogance of Mr. Hoffman” and praised Khan as both one of the best Biden appointees and best FTC chairs in a “very, very long time.”
“Billionaires should not be telling candidates who to be keeping on or not,” the Vermont independent told CNN in a phone interview Thursday. “This concerns me because Lina Khan is doing a great job and I would hope and expect that the VP, if she wins, keeps her on.”
Another progressive, Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, told CNN in a statement that Khan has done an “excellent job” and “should of course continue her work lowering costs, protecting workers and supporting entrepreneurs.”
It takes a LOT for me to grudgingly agree with Saint Bernard.
Why does Hoffman (and the rest of the Silicon Valley Broligarchy) loathe Kahn?
Glad you asked. She has brought a renewed focus on antitrust to the FTC, where the anti trust bona fides of the FTC have been to pretty much let the tech ecosystem run roughshod over the system as the “growth first, profit later” scaling strategy of the startups that became dominant in the 2000’s, and wildfire in the 2010’s.
This clique of uber-rich libertarian leaning tech founders posit that a startup should focus on growth at all costs, disrupting legacy businesses, quashing them, and then when they become too big to control, they (the startups) then can cower the regulators into cementing their position in the space, a little something economists have a special name for: Regulatory Capture:
In politics, regulatory capture (also called agency capture) is a form of corruption of authority that occurs when a political entity, policymaker, or regulator is co-opted to serve the commercial, ideological, or political interests of a minor constituency, such as a particular geographic area, industry, profession, or ideological group.
When regulatory capture occurs, a special interest is prioritized over the general interests of the public, leading to a net loss for society. The theory of client politics is related to that of rent-seeking and political failure; client politics "occurs when most or all of the benefits of a program go to some single, reasonably small interest (e.g., industry, profession, or locality) but most or all of the costs will be borne by a large number of people (for example, all taxpayers)".
Basically, it is when a service or product becomes so dominant that when regulators finally act, they are influenced by the ginormous enterprise, and end up locking in their dominant position as the natural market.
Why do they hate Lina Kahn? Because she says “fuck that” to their regulatory capture, and she has aggressively pursued some of the most egregious offenders, and that makes the Broligarchs uncomfortable.
So, Reid Hoffman ponies up to the bar, writes a $7M check, and then tries to force Harris, should she win1, to remove Lina Kahn, and replace her with some milquetoast regulator who will turn a kind eye.
The Harris campaign so far has said that they were not going to take this advice attached to a high 7-figure check, the right response.
The perfect response would be to send that check back to Reid and tell him to shove it up his corpulent ass.
Reid Hoffman, you are the Human Garbage of the Week.
Coda
If you are unaware of behaviors like this, I recommend that you read Ed Zitron’s posts on “The Rot Economy”:
Also, Matt Stoller’s Substack, “Big” is awash with great writing on anti-trust.
She’s gonna destroy the tangerine hued Hitler.
I would hope with the amount of campaign cash coming in the Harris folks can afford to say no to $7 million that has strings attached.
Slight disagreement. They should keep the cash and keep Kahn in place. Write Reid an AI generated thank you note and ask for more donations so they can continue their anti-trust work.