Donald Trump News: Why world's three richest women are anti-Trump

A New York Times article recently pointed, how three female powerhouses, with the biggest Silicon Valley fortunes, are clearly ranged against Donald Trump.The first is Laurene Powell Jobs, whom Trump tore into on Twitter for “wasting” her ex-husband Steve Jobs’ money on the Atlantic, which he called a “radical left magazine”. But that’s not all, the NYT piece pointed out — Melinda Gates and Mackenzie Scott, both enormously wealthy and influential, have firmly placed themselves on the same side as Jobs.Women don’t like Trump, given a choice. Gender does not vault over other political priorities, and certainly, many white Republican women will remain a bulwark of support for him. But his misogyny has alienated nearly every other female constituency — he boasted of his rapport with “suburban housewives”, but polls show that 66 percent of even those suburban women disapprove of his record, and 58 percent “strongly disapprove”. He is as unpopular as it gets with women of colour, liberal women, and those with college degrees. medium78046365He isn’t hugely popular with the tech industry either. Apart from a few zealous supporters like Palantir’s Peter Thiel, Silicon Valley has not been enthusiastic about Trump. While tech CEOs have tried to appease him, tech workers have openly resisted. Given the nature and needs of the industry, friction with Trump on diversity and immigration was only to be expected. And now, ahead of the election, the sides have been clearly underlined, and most of Silicon Valley has rallied behind Democratic candidate Joe Biden. Powell Jobs is among the handful who donated the legal maximum of $6,20,000 to the Biden campaign.MacKenzie Scott, formerly married to Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, is now pouring her money into causes that Trump cannot abide, the NYT points out. (Trump has been in a long feud with Bezos, who also owns the Washington Post). Melinda Gates too, in a recent interview, gave the Trump administration a “D-minus” grade for its handling of coronavirus, describing the situation as ‘chaos’ and criticising the lack of national leadership. medium78046379The three women identified by the New York Times — a wife, a widow and a divorcee — are admittedly powerful because of their relationships with tech billionaires. But this is besides the point. Many people, including Trump, owe part of their success to family relationships, as the NYT piece points out. Also remember, it is notoriously difficult for women to rise in Silicon Valley’s bro culture. Men own 91 percent of employee and founder equity, and women get paid less than men with the same qualifications.In his attack on Jobs, Trump also implied that she was freely spending her husband’s earnings. But the law recognises the truth that sexist men look away from. The concept of marital property acknowledges that marriage is a partnership — women may have sunk time and energy into the home and family while a man works for money outside the home. At the end of the partnership, the woman has some claim to the couple’s common property, acquired during the course of the marriage. In the case of Amazon, Mackenzie Scott gave up her job and her novel-writing ambitions to move to the West Coast with her husband Jeff Bezos. She came up with the startup’s name and was its first accountant, and more importantly, was his main team-mate and support system as the company soared. So when Scott and Bezos divorced after 25 years, she got $35 billion from their $145 billion fortune, and became one of the wealthiest women in the world. Immediately after, she signed the Giving Pledge and has been steadily donating that money to causes supporting and led by women, LGBT rights and racial justice groups. Unlike her husband, who has often been criticised for parsimony, Scott pledged “not to stop till the safe is empty,” and has given away 1.7 billion in the last year alone. In her philanthropy, she has made a quiet effort to address root causes of injustice, rather than make splashy donations — priorities that are ‘more typical’ of female donors, according to an expert. medium78046387Melinda Gates worked for six years at Microsoft until she married Bill Gates, and it was she who pushed him towards philanthropy. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is now the world’s largest private charitable organisation, focused on health and education. Gates also cares greatly about women’s issues — she has drawn attention to ‘time poverty’, the unpaid labour that keeps women from reaching their potential. She has also called out the aggressive, male-dominated work culture in tech firms.Women intimately understand what it is to be on the other side of power. Many are spurred by this awareness to advocate for others who are socially marginalised. Like many others, Jobs, Gates and Scott are using their energies and resources to fight poverty, to strengthen racial justice, queer rights and diversity. That automatically places them in opposition to a man like Trump, who uses every chance he gets to champion the social over-dog.