Slam Trump..

Tech execs, investors slam Trump

By TONY ROMM

Roughly 150 tech executives and investors including Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman and media mogul Barry Diller slammed Donald Trump today for campaigning on “anger, bigotry, fear of new ideas and new people” — an approach, they said, that would be a “disaster” for Silicon Valley.

In the open letter, published on The Huffington Post and Medium, the collection of industry leaders say Trump “traffics in ethnic and racial stereotypes” in his opposition to immigration reform. They knock the presumptive GOP nominee for his idea of “shutting down” the internet to address security threats. And they criticize Trump for failing to laying out much of a tech agenda, saying he “articulates few policies beyond erratic and contradictory pronouncements.”

“We have listened to Donald Trump over the past year and we have concluded: Trump would be a disaster for innovation,” they write. “His vision stands against the open exchange of ideas, free movement of people, and productive engagement with the outside world that is critical to our economy — and that provide the foundation for innovation and growth.”

Others signing the letter include Stacy Brown-Philpot, the CEO of TaskRabbit; Vint Cerf, one of the founders of the internet; Reed Hundt, a former chairman of the FCC; David Karp, the founder of Tumblr; Vinod Khosla, the founder of Khosla Ventures; and Ron Klain, the executive vice president of Revolution.

The executives say they’re acting on their own, and not on behalf of their companies. Some are longtime Democratic backers or supporters of the party's presumptive nominee, Hillary Clinton.