The Top 100 Political Donors Ranked by Ethnicity

Documenting my column yesterday in Taki's on Jewish and gentile campaign contributors, here are the names of the Top 100 donors.

My latest Taki’s Magazine column tries to get a feel for changes of attitude among Jewish elites between the 2020 and 2024 elections by looking at OpenSecrets.org’s list of the 100 biggest political donors in each year and then estimating ethnicities from online sources.

As I reported yesterday, among the top 100 donors who are Jewish, giving to Democrats dropped 33% from 2020 to 2024, while big Jewish donors gave 29% more to Republicans.

But who exactly are these Top 100 Donors? I didn’t have room to list them all in Taki’s Magazine, so I will list their names here now.

In case you are interested here, are eight tables ranking the gentile and Jewish big givers to the Democrats and the Republicans in 2024 and 2020.

(By the way, if this long email gets truncated, just go to SteveSailer.net and read it there.)

Major gentile donors to the Democrats in 2024:

Fred Eychaner, a gay Chicago TV and newspaper entrepreneur, is sometimes listed as a Jewish zillionaire, but he was raised in a Methodist family.

Reid Hoffman, founder of Linked-In, is often assumed to be Jewish because whoever heard of a high-achieving person with a German surname who isn’t Jewish? But he’s not.

Wayne D. Jordan is a black real estate developer in the East San Francisco Bay area. He appears to be the only black on the top 100 list.

Chris Larsen is a Bay Area tech founder.

James Murdoch is the son of Rupert Murdoch. Yes, he being a Democrat and Rupert a Republican has caused a bit of friction within the family.

Patty Quillin is the wife of Reed Hastings, co-founder of Netflix. Reed Hastings is often confused with Reid Hoffman, and like Hoffman is assumed to be Jewish. After all, Hastings might be the most powerful man in Show Biz, so he has to be Jewish, right? But, instead, Hastings is about as pure Boston WASP as still exists. His father Wilmot Reed Hastings Sr. was an active Congregationalist and his mother was one of the Boston Brahmin Loomis family.

Jay Scheide lists his occupation as “unemployed,” although he composes classical music. He is a scion of an old money Presbyterian family whose fortune goes back perhaps before the Civil War to the 1859 Pennsylvania oil bonanza.

Karla Jurvetson, née Tinklenberg, is a doctor who was married to Steve Jurvetson, a big early investor in SpaceX and Tesla. They’ve been divorced for a decade.

Wendy Schmidt, née Boyle, is the wife of Eric Schmidt, long the CEO of Google. Eric Schmidt is another high-achiever with a German surname who is widely assumed to be Jewish but is not. A friend who had worked for Google once said that if you are looking for the central figure in the informal American power structure, Schmidt might be the best candidate.

Amos Hostetter sometimes shows up on Jewish publications lists of Jewish billionaires, but he’s not.

The next seven tables will appear after the paywall.

Not many huge donors give heavily to both parties (venture capitalist Ben Horowitz was the most even-handed big giver in 2024), but quite a few give one or two percent of their total to a candidate or a cause in the other party. So the bottom of the lists tend to include a number of opposite party donors. (E.g., the two Walmart-scion Waltons are major Republican donors, but they gave a little to Democrats).

Also, a few top 100 donors, such as Miguel Bezos (and in years when he gives heavily enough to make the top 100 list, his stepson Jeff Bezos), tend to give primarily to nonpartisan or bipartisan PACs.

There are probably a few mistake in ethnicity attribution, so if you see any, please let me know.

Here are 2024 Jewish Democratic donors:

Michael Bloomberg defeated the Democratic nominee for mayor of New York three times, the first time as a Republican, the next two times as an Independent.

Dustin Moskovitz had a room down the hall from Mark Zuckerberg at Harvard. He was an extremely hard working programmer in the early years of Facebook.

James Simons is the math genius who founded the Renaissance Technologies hedge fund, one of the rare few hedge funds that exist mostly to make bundles of money for the partners and employees rather than to collect 2 and 20 from clients.

Deborah Simon is the daughter of shopping mall magnate Melvin Simon.

Stephen Mandel is a hedge fund guy.

“James R. & Mary K. Pritzker” is probably a typo, which isn’t rare in Open Secrets records. Mary Kathryn Pritzker is the wife of Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker, of the Pritzker hotel fortune. I don’t see a “James R. Pritzker” anywhere else. In case you are wondering (as I was), the Pritzker extended family’s military ex-man, Colonel Jennifer Pritzker, used to be Col. James N. Pritzker. So, presumably, this listing is actually Gov. J.B. Pritzker.

Mark Heising is a Silicon Valley guy.

Jeffrey Skill is likely Jeffrey Skoll of E-Bay.

You’ve probably heard of Steven Spielberg.

Here are last year’s top gentile GOP givers:

Elon Musk’s name is occasionally in the news.

Timothy Mellon is the great-grandson of the founder of Mellon Bank in Pittsburgh.

The Uihleins founded the U-Line shipping supply company. They are German American gentiles.

Kenneth Griffin owns 80% of Citadel hedge fund.

Tim Dunn is an oil and gas guy in Texas.

Robert Bigelow founded a hotel firm and an aerospace firm. He’s really into UFOs and parapsychology.

And here are 2024 Jewish GOP benefactors:

Miriam Adelson is the Israeli-born widow of casino owner Sheldon Adelson. She’s also a big supporter of Likud in Israel.

Jeff Yass is in stock trading and owns a chunk of TikTok.

Paul Singer is a hedge fund guy who engages in colorful “vulture capitalist” maneuvers like attempting to seize an Argentinean navy ship in port in Ghana over unpaid sovereign debt.

Stephen A. Schwarzman is CEO of Blackstone Group, which I can never keep straight from BlackRock.

Laura Perlmutter is the wife of Israeli-American businessman Isaac Perlmutter, who wound up in charge of Marvel movies during their biggest era. From Wikipedia:

In September 2015, Perlmutter stopped overseeing the development of Marvel Studios. Disney felt studio head Kevin Feige should report directly to the chair of The Walt Disney Studios, Alan Horn… The restructuring was reportedly due to Feige's "frustration" of working with Perlmutter as well as alleged comments and actions by Perlmutter, such as replacing Terrence Howard – who wanted more money to continue playing James Rhodes – with Don Cheadle, arguing that black people "look the same." Perlmutter's sidelining coincided with a notable increase in Marvel Studios' focus on diversity and inclusiveness.

Jan Koum is from Ukraine. He co-founded WhatsApp and sold it to Facebook. He first got into big time political giving in the 2022 cycle. So, he’s an example beside Elon of Silicon Valley getting into supporting Republicans, although in general that trend appears overstated.

Thomas Klingenstein is a hedge fund guy and chairman of the Claremont Institute.

Howard Lutnick was CEO of Cantor Fitzgerald, the firm with offices on top of the World Trade Center that lost 658 employees on 9/11. (Lutnick was taking his child to kindergarten at the time, but his brother was killed.) He was a Democrat until 2016 and is now Secretary of Commerce and one of the chief tariff hawks in the Trump Administration.

And here are the 2020 top 100 donors, beginning with gentile Democrats (note the half Jewish Tom Steyer and Steve Ballmer at the bottom of the list):

Jewish Democrats in 2020, with Steyer and Ballmer at the bottom of the list here too:

Gentile Republicans in 2020:

Larry Ellison of Oracle has an Italian-American father and a Jewish-American mother. He was raised by his mom’s Jewish uncle and aunt. So, following my rule of thumb that nature and nurture tend to be about 50-50 in importance, I come up with Ellison as 75% Jewish and 25% gentile. You (and, for all I know, Larry) might disagree.

2020 Jewish Republican donors:

I’m sorry to have to use screenshots, but SubStack does not conveniently support pasting spreadsheet tables into posts.