Former PayPal President David Marcus said he has completed “a gradual political 180” and is now backing the Republican Party and Donald Trump.
Marcus led PayPal from 2012 to 2014 before he became Facebook’s vice president of Messaging Products, a position he held until 2019 when he headed up a program to develop Facebook’s cryptocurrency capabilities. The tech executive left Facebook at the end of 2021, and a year later, co-founded L.A.-based financial tech company Lightspark.
Marcus, who said he backed Democrats in “every previous election,” wrote in a post on X on Wednesday that he’s become disillusioned by the current Democratic Party moving “increasingly” to the Left. While Marcus said he disagrees with Trump and the GOP on some issues, especially abortion, he supports the party’s pro-America, pro-Constitution, and pro-business platform.
“I am crossing the Rubicon and backing the Republican Party and President Trump,” Marcus wrote. “Many — including a former version of myself — get trapped in a mental framework that becomes their identity and prevents them from radically evolving their thinking with new facts and information. I finally broke free from it.”
Marcus adds his name to a growing list of tech executives and investors who have said they are flipping from voting for Democrats to Republicans in the 2024 election. Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, investors Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, and Sequoia partner Doug Leone have all recently backed Trump’s campaign.
“My journey has been a gradual political 180 from where I stood in every previous election. It has been an eye-opening process of disenchantment, zero-basing lifelong beliefs, and rebuilding from there,” Marcus added in his post.
