Former president Donald Trump makes an appearance during Jacob Helberg’s address at this year’s Hill & Valley Forum.
Tasos Katopodis/Getty ImagesJacob Helberg has never built a successful tech company, or led a major fund. But after rallying support for the TikTok ban bill, the former Democratic fundraiser has become one of Silicon Valley’s conduits to former president Donald Trump. Where did he come from?
By David Jeans, Forbes Staff
The Hill and Valley Forum was something of a victory lap for its organizer Jacob Helberg, the 34-year-old tech executive who rallied bipartisan support for the so-called TikTok bill that passed Congress in April — a crowning moment heralded with accolades from former president Donald Trump. “Jacob, I want to thank you,” Trump said to a room of leaders from Silicon Valley and D.C., in a pre-recorded video at the conference in May. “Our meeting was very productive on AI and all of the ramifications, both good and bad.”
For a former Democrat who donated to Biden’s last presidential campaign and gave $1.5 million to Democrats in the 2020 election, according to FEC records, Trump’s endorsement capped an uncanny rise in Republican circles where Helberg touts himself as Silicon Valley’s China hawk. Now, he’s among a coterie of wealthy tech elites lining up to shape tech policy by helping Trump unseat Biden in the November presidential election. As an advisor to defense contractor Palantir and a friend to its co-founder Peter Thiel, an outspoken supporter of Trump in the 2016 election, Helberg has a lot to say — particularly on AI.
And Trump, it appears, is listening. Helberg has donated more than $1 million to political groups supporting the former president, according to FEC filings and the investor, and he has committed another $1 million. He told Forbes he talks to Trump’s campaign “every other day,” but declined, with a smile, to say whether he’s discussed a potential administration role. “I'm completely focused on what I'm doing right now,” he said. (The Trump campaign didn’t respond to a request for comment.)
The reasons for Helberg's meteoric rise in GOP circles are as fuzzy as his own credentials. And despite appearing at high-profile policy events and garnering praise from Trump himself, it's hard to tell what he actually does from day to day. He is vague when explaining his nine-to-five role at Palantir, for instance, saying that he helps “think through the ways in which technology software and AI is going to be a platform in this new great power rivalry landscape.” He describes his interactions with the Trump campaign as “an extracurricular.” And as for his role advising Congress on a potential ban of TikTok in the States, well, “there are some residual workstreams” though “the bill’s signed, it really is a done deal.” (A spokesperson for Palantir didn’t respond to a request for comment.)
Unlike other Silicon Valley heavyweights who’ve parlayed their business careers into governmental influence, like former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, Helberg has built his reputation in other ways. Key among them: using his hawkish anti-China treatise The Wires of War to help him leapfrog from a mid-level role on Google’s news policy team into think tank jobs and a spot on the powerful U.S-China Economic and Security Review Commission, which he used to rally support in Congress for the TikTok bill.
"I am always happy when people leave the Democratic party."
His personal connections played no small role too: He married tech investor and major Republican donor Keith Rabois in 2018 at a ceremony officiated by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman (they now share two children). “Keith had his fingerprints on some of the most prominent companies in the Valley,” Helberg wrote in his book, “and growing closer to him meant becoming more firmly embedded in that culture. I came to know some of tech's most original thinkers.”
“A lot of people have taken notice [of Helberg] over time,” said Kevin Hartz, the founder of Eventbrite, who went to college with Rabois, and attended Helberg’s wedding. “He's got great relationships with people around him that are backing him.”
Asked about Helberg’s political shift and rise in GOP circles, Rabois, who has donated around $3 million to Republicans this election cycle, according to FEC records, told Forbes in an email: "I am always happy when people leave the Democratic party."
Helberg at the Hill & Valley Forum.
Leigh Vogel/Getty ImagesHelberg, who grew up between Paris and Brussels before moving to the U.S. for college, touts a hit list of experiences that appear to establish him as a national security expert. Among them is his role as a “founding member” of a startup called GeoQuant, a company that used algorithms to calculate geopolitical risk, according to his book. “I hired a team and helped raise the initial funding to get GeoQuant off the ground,” he wrote, adding “our clients were Fortune 500 companies.”
But Helberg wasn’t an employee of GeoQuant when it was incorporated in 2016 and wasn’t involved afterward, a person familiar with the company’s operations told Forbes. And he isn’t mentioned in an early press release that names its cofounders and its first employee. Two people familiar with the company’s origin story instead said Helberg worked with its cofounders to arrange temporary office space in its early start up days. Mark Rosenberg, GeoQuant’s CEO, didn’t respond to questions about whether Helberg made hires or raised funding; He would say only that he was a “founding member.”
Got a tip? Contact David Jeans at djeans@forbes.com or 347-559-5443 on Signal.
Another odd claim: Helberg has publicly said in his book and in prominent bios that reinsurance giant Swiss Re invested in GeoQuant through its venture capital arm. But Mark Bonthrone, a spokesperson for the $35 billion company told Forbes that it had not done so and does not have a venture arm. Marcy Simon, Helberg’s spokesperson, told Forbes that Helberg “stands by every statement in his book.”
Helberg also likes to highlight his work at two prominent think tanks — dueling co-chairmanships at the Brookings Institute’s China Strategy and U.S.-France on China working groups, and an adjunct fellowship at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Both confirmed his titles, but told Forbes he did not produce research or written publications.
And in many places, including on his current commission bio, Helberg states that he is a “senior advisor” to the Stanford University Center for Geopolitics and Technology. However, no school by that name exists, and Helberg hasn’t worked there since 2022. His “senior advisor” position was a temporary part-time contractor role while he worked on his book, at the Program on Geopolitics, Technology and Governance at Stanford’s Center for International Security and Cooperation, according to the program’s director, Andrew Grotto. “He didn't advise students or teach or have any other formal student-facing role,” Grotto said. Helberg’s commission bio and LinkedIn page were updated after Forbes inquired.
“Undoing the Biden EO, as Trump and Helberg are eager to do, would be a gift to China and others.”
After supporting Hillary Clinton in 2016, then donating to Democrats ahead of the last presidential election, Helberg’s political reimagining began in early 2020 when he left Google to start work on his book, positing that an ongoing distrust between Silicon Valley and Capitol Hill would leave America inferior to China. Drawing on his time at the tech giant, he recounted Russia’s misinformation efforts during the 2016 election, and the threat of China-owned technological infrastructure in the U.S. At the time, those were already dusty ideas — the Wall Street Journal wrote in a review that “Mr. Helberg…has little new to offer” — but the message resonated with Republicans like representatives Steve Scalise and Michael McCaul.
Another Republican who took notice was former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, who appointed Helberg to the powerful, but little-known U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission in 2023. In that role, he chaired a congressional hearing on the threats of Chinese technology, including TikTok, and spoke with more than 100 lawmakers to drum up support for the TikTok legislation. When the bill passed in April, requiring TikTok’s parent ByteDance to sell it to a U.S. company or shut down its operations in the states, he was at the center of several news stories, though Michael Wessel, another USCC commissioner speaking for himself, told Forbes “no one commissioner determines the issues or outcomes, it is a consensus-guided effort.”
Combined with the name-brand think tank roles, Helberg’s image as national security power broker has since been cemented by his role helming the Hill and Valley Forum. “Jacob’s North Star has been working on a bipartisan basis to elevate technology issues that are important to national security,” said the venture capitalist and Lux Capital founder Josh Wolfe, who attended this year’s forum. “He’s been adept at building coalitions and relationships in both Washington DC and Silicon Valley.”
But recently, Helberg’s advocacy for a Trump plan to strip away a Biden executive order that would impose bias and national security guardrails around AI development has put him at odds with some prominent Silicon Valley leaders who previously supported his efforts on TikTok. Broadly, Helberg believes that existing laws already govern AI appropriately, and that “a morass of red tape” would harm U.S. competition with China. “Mostly Jacob and I have agreed on China,” venture capitalist Vinod Khosla told Forbes. On AI, “I'll just agree to disagree.”
Reid Hoffman, the LinkedIn co-founder and venture capitalist who advised the Biden administration on its order, put it more forcefully: The Biden measure is “notable for calling for an increase in investments in AI development, research, and capacity, and in recruiting AI talent to bolster the government's own AI capabilities,” he told Forbes. “Undoing the Biden EO, as Trump and Helberg are eager to do, would be a gift to China and others.”
“I think everyone agrees that we would like to keep TikTok.”
It’s worth noting that Helberg only first met Trump in person last October. “It was like an out-of-body experience,” Helberg gushed. “I experienced a feeling that I rarely do, because I'm used to meeting a lot of elected officials, that he has such a presence that it felt a little bit like a time warp.”
To some people close to Helberg, his conversion to Trump-Republican (“a true love story,” he told The Information) is little more than advantageous positioning. Until recently “he didn't have a view on AI or had ever expressed this super close relationship to Trump,” said one Silicon Valley bigwig who travels in Helberg’s circles. “Now's the time to get noticed by Trump because he's paying attention to anything that helps him get elected.”
While he and Trump are aligned on undoing Biden’s precautions for AI, they don’t see eye to eye on another big tech issue: TikTok. Trump tried to ban the app in 2020, but has since embraced it, sharpening it as a political weapon against his presumptive opponent in the upcoming presidential election. “Just so everyone knows, especially the young people, Crooked Joe Biden is responsible for banning TikTok,” Trump wrote on Truth Social in April. “He is the one pushing it to close.” In June, the former president joined the app, describing it as an “honor.”
Pressed on the obvious dissonance here, Helberg dismissed it. Trump is simply reaching for a broader audience, he explained. “I think everyone agrees that we would like to keep TikTok,” he said, clarifying, “I would like to keep an American-owned TikTok, sure.”