Keith Rabois of Khosla Ventures attends Day 3 of TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2013 at the San Francisco Design Center on September 11, 2013 in San Francisco, California.
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Republican megadonors on Tuesday threatened to cut off campaign funding to lawmakers unless they vote in favor of a bill that would effectively ban TikTok in the United States.
“We will never fund leadership PACs (or NRSCs) run by Republican candidates or Republicans who vote against the TikTok bill.” venture capitalist Keith Lavoie wrote about X.
The House of Representatives is expected to pass a bill Wednesday that would force TikTok’s parent company, China-based ByteDance, to sell the social media platform. Supporters of the bill argue that ByteDance’s continued ownership of TikTok and its large amounts of user data pose a national security threat to the United States.
“Support for the TikTok bill is an IQ test” for lawmakers, Lavoie wrote in an email to CNBC.
In February, Lavoie reportedly donated $500,000 to the Congressional Leadership Fund, a political action committee that supports Republican House candidates. federal election commission filing.
Lavoie’s threat could have a major impact on Republican lawmakers who are still undecided on whether to support the bill.
That political calculus was further complicated for some of the bill’s supporters last week when former President Donald Trump announced he opposed the bill. Tesla CEO and billionaire Elon Musk, a potential Republican presidential candidate, also criticized the bill.
The bill’s prospects for passage in the Senate remained uncertain Tuesday.
“It’s up to the Democratic leadership in the Senate.” [Chuck Schumer] To bring it to the floor. That way we’ll have a clear voting record of where each senator stands on this issue,” Lavoie told CNBC.
If the bill passes the Senate and is signed into law, ByteDance will have just six months to sell TikTok before it is banned from U.S. app stores and web hosting sites.
Mr. Lavoie, managing director of Khosla Ventures, donated more than $41,000 to the National Republican Senatorial Committee last year. He also donated more than $120,000 to the National Republican Congressional Committee, the NRSC’s lower house counterpart.
Lavoie said whether he continues to support the NRCC will depend in part on how Republican leadership handles upcoming votes.
House Speaker Mike Johnson of Louisiana has indicated he will vote for the bill, and Majority Leader Steve Scalise called it “an important piece of national security legislation.”
Republican Tom Emmer also supports the bill. Suspect In March 2023, it said TikTok was “nothing but a Chinese Communist Party spy app that collects sensitive information on 150 million US users, which could then be misused by the Chinese government.”
