Former PayPal President Says He’s ‘Crossing The Rubicon,’ Endorses Trump

Former PayPal President David Marcus said he has completed “a gradual political 180” and is now backing the Republican Party and Donald Trump.

Marcus led PayPal from 2012 to 2014 before he became Facebook’s vice president of Messaging Products, a position he held until 2019 when he headed up a program to develop Facebook’s cryptocurrency capabilities. The tech executive left Facebook at the end of 2021, and a year later, co-founded L.A.-based financial tech company Lightspark.

Marcus, who said he backed Democrats in “every previous election,” wrote in a post on X on Wednesday that he’s become disillusioned by the current Democratic Party moving “increasingly” to the Left. While Marcus said he disagrees with Trump and the GOP on some issues, especially abortion, he supports the party’s pro-America, pro-Constitution, and pro-business platform.

“I am crossing the Rubicon and backing the Republican Party and President Trump,” Marcus wrote. “Many — including a former version of myself — get trapped in a mental framework that becomes their identity and prevents them from radically evolving their thinking with new facts and information. I finally broke free from it.”

Marcus adds his name to a growing list of tech executives and investors who have said they are flipping from voting for Democrats to Republicans in the 2024 election. Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, investors Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, and Sequoia partner Doug Leone have all recently backed Trump’s campaign.

“My journey has been a gradual political 180 from where I stood in every previous election. It has been an eye-opening process of disenchantment, zero-basing lifelong beliefs, and rebuilding from there,” Marcus added in his post.

He pointed to “a series of realizations” about the Democratic Party beginning in 2019 that pushed him to support Republicans.

“At the time, I still believed the mainstream idea that Democrats were all about serving the People. However, I was shocked to learn that, for the most part, Republicans cared more deeply about their constituents, while Democrats, in my experience, cared more about government power and control,” he wrote. “This is my observation on balance, with many stories to back it up. I also found that more Republicans wanted to understand our project’s goals and took the time to learn about the risks of censoring payments and controlling the network. I found myself remarkably aligned with them.”

Then, during the COVID pandemic and the Biden administration’s suppression of information about the COVID vaccine, Marcus said he “fully appreciated why Republicans value freedom of speech and preventing censorship.” He added that the “spinning and manufacturing a parallel reality to serve the Dem agenda solidified by complicit mainstream media, hit home with the Hunter Biden laptop story, the coordinated vilification of President Trump and his followers, and President Biden’s cognitive decline — depriving voters of a voice in a proper primary.”

“This version of the Democratic Party is sidelining moderates and centrists and has adopted an increasingly leftist ideology,” he continued. “This drift to the left has dictated policies from which I’ve found myself estranged.”

Marcus wrote, “[W]e need a President who is unequivocally pro: America, the Constitution, business, Bitcoin/crypto, innovation, Israel, small government, legal immigration, free speech, meritocracy, and common sense — and anti: regulatory proliferation, illegal immigration, unjust wars, Iran’s current regime, and domestic groups that oppose American values. These issues are central to President Trump’s platform.”