Biden, Jeff Yass & D.C.’s TikTok Intrigue

Inside the Silicon Valley lunch behind the president’s explorations on TikTok—and the Republican billionaire fighting to keep the app unbanned.

The lunch was part of a new effort by Biden world to better cultivate business elites, who have oodles of cash, healthy egos, and who have never really felt like they were in the president’s inner circle, as they did during the Obama era. Photo: Amr Alfiky-Pool/Getty Images

Theodore Schleifer

March 13, 2024

At the White House late last year, Joe Biden found himself at a private lunch with a small group of tech leaders who had flown in from Silicon Valley. Among them were billionaires Reid Hoffman, the undisputed quarterback of the industry’s Democratic political initiatives, and his close friend Mark Pincus, the Zynga founder who, by the holidays, would become one of the few people so far this cycle to cut the legal maximum—$929,600—to the Democratic National Committee.