Move over Koch bros: Facebook co-founder pledges $20mn to Dems

A Facebook co-founder has become the third biggest donor of the 2016 campaign, pledging $20 million to the presidential campaign of Hillary Clinton and other Democratic Party efforts. Donation data show Clinton is a clear favorite of US billionaires.

Dustin Moskovitz was the college roommate of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, and his current net worth is estimated at $10 billion. Until now, he had donated less than $5,000 to political campaigns – but this time, he says, it’s different.

His Thursday announcement continues the trend of the richest one percent of Americans overwhelmingly favoring Clinton, donating more than $200 million to her campaign by the end of July – compared to less than $20 million for Trump – according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

“Though we’ve voted for the Democratic nominee each of the times we’ve cast a ballot, we’ve considered ourselves independent thinkers who respect candidates and positions from both sides of the aisle,” Moskovitz and his wife, Cari Tuna, wrote on Medium.

This election has become “a referendum on who we want to be – as individuals, as a nation and as a society,” they argued, adding that they favored “increased tolerance, diversity and interdependence in the name of mutual prosperity.”

Accusing Republican nominee Donald Trump of stoking fear, tribalism, and divisiveness, the billionaire and his wife declared their support for the Democratic Party “and Hillary Clinton in particular,” who they say is “running on a vision of optimism, pragmatism, inclusiveness and mutual benefit.”

To that end, they have committed $20 million to be divided between the Hillary Victory Fund, the Senate and House Democrats, For Our Future PAC, MoveOn.org, Color of Change PAC, the League of Conservation Voters, and several other groups.

At least $5 million will go to the For Our Future PAC, according to TechCrunch. The political action committee was co-founded by another Democratic mega-donor, Tom Steyer, who has reportedly invested $31.5 million into this year’s campaign.

The donation would make Moskovitz the third-biggest single donor in this year’s campaign, CNN reported. He comes in after Steyer and Robert Mercer, a hedge fund manager who has given just over $20 million to various Republican groups and backs Trump.

Tuna, a Yale graduate and former Wall Street Journal reporter, has donated to the Democrats before. She spent $150,000 on Proposition 47, a California ballot initiative downgrading some drug possession charges, in 2014. That same year, she gave $26,000 to Sean Eldridge, a Democrat who ran for the US House of Representatives from New York, but lost.

In January of 2015, months before Trump entered the Republican race, the billionaire Koch Brothers announced they would raise almost $1 billion for various GOP causes in the 2016 election, but in April of this year – after Trump triumphed in the Republican primaries – they hinted they would support Clinton instead.