LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman said he believes President-elect Trump will likely come after him for supporting Vice President Harris’s presidential campaign.
“I think that there’s a greater than 50 percent chance that there will be repercussions from a misdirection and corruption of the institutions of state to respond to my having tried to help Harris get elected,” Hoffman said on Monday’s episode of British entrepreneur Steven Bartlett’s podcast “The Diary of a CEO.”
Hoffman was an outspoken supporter of Harris during her campaign, joining other entrepreneurs and billionaires in the “Business Leaders for Harris” group to encourage backing of Harris’s White House bid. Hoffman was also one of President Biden’s biggest donors during his campaign.
Now, Hoffman said retaliations from the president-elect are more than likely, naming possibilities like IRS audits or phone calls trying to hurt his business prospects. He added these actions would be “undemocratic and un-American.”
“It could get much worse, but I don’t really want to speculate on it because I don’t want to give anybody any ideas,” he said on the podcast.
Hoffman also said that other business leaders praised his outspokenness and actions to support Harris but didn’t follow suit out of fear of retaliation from the incoming president.
“Part of the reason why I think less people were public about it this cycle was because President Trump was threatening personal and political retaliation, and so you had to have a certain degree of courage to stand up — and courage in the public area,” he said.
“President Trump will serve ALL Americans, even those who did not vote for him in the election. He will unify the country through success,” Trump spokesperson Karoline Leavitt told The Hill in response to the comments.
Updated at 3:55 pm ET.
