Facebook cofounder Dustin Moskovitz announced Friday that he and his wife will make a $20 million donation to Democratic groups in an effort to prevent Donald Trump from winning the presidency.
The move makes him the third largest publicly-disclosed donor in the 2016 election cycle.
Moskovitz and his wife Cari Tuna said in a post on Medium that they will divvy up the funds among a number of PACs, including the Hillary Victory Fund and MoveOn.org’s political action arm. The largest contributions of $5 million will go toward the League of Conservation Voters, an environmentalist group, and For Our Future, a PAC organized by labor and environmental groups.
“This decision was not easy, particularly because we have reservations about anyone using large amounts of money to influence elections,” Moskovitz and Tuna wrote. “But it is clear that if Secretary Clinton wins the election, America will advance much further toward the world we hope to see. If Donald Trump wins, the country will fall backward.”
Moskovitz and Tuna’s post criticizes Trump, and the Republican Party more broadly, for “running on a zero-sum vision, stressing a false contest between their constituency and the rest of the world.” The couple wrote that they have traditionally avoided donating to elections because they respect candidates and policies from both sides of the aisle. However, they believe the Republicans are now running a campaign built on “fear and hostility.”
In July, Moskovitz was one of 145 signatories to an open letter from tech leaders saying Trump would be “a disaster for innovation.” The letter, also published on Medium, included other billionaire technology executives like eBay founder Pierre Omidyar and Twitter cofounder Evan Williams.
The only 2016 election donors who have given more than Moskovitz and Tuna’s $20 million pledge are billionaire hedge-fund founder Tom Steyer, who has given $38 million to Democratic coffers, and Renaissance Technologies’ Robert Mercer, who’s given just over $20 million to Republicans.
Moskovitz is not the first unlikely suspect to rally behind Clinton in the 2016 election cycle. Last month, Republican Meg Whitman, the CEO of Hewlett Packard and a billionaire as a result of her decade running eBay, posted a statement on social media saying she would donate to and fundraise for the Democratic nominee’s campaign. Along with Moskovitz and Whitman, other Forbes 400 list members who have endorsed Clinton include Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban, investor Warren Buffett and Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz.
Though Moskovitz hasn’t been a major political donor prior to 2016, he and Tuna, a former Wall Street Journal reporter, have been active philanthropists, becoming the youngest couple to sign on to the Gates-Buffett Giving Pledge in 2010. Their philanthropic foundation Good Ventures has given to causes ranging from marriage equality to malaria eradication.