Keith Rabois of Khosla Ventures attends day three of TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2013 at San Francisco Design Center on September 11, 2013 in San Francisco, California.
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A Republican megadonor threatened Tuesday to cut campaign contributions to members of Congress unless they vote for a bill that could effectively ban TikTok in the United States.
“Will never fund any Republican candidate or leadership PAC (or NRSC) run by Republicans who vote against TikTok legislation,” venture capitalist Keith Rabois wrote on X.
On Wednesday, the House is expected to pass a bill to force TikTok’s parent company, China-based ByteDance, to sell the social media platform. Supporters of the bill say ByteDance’s continued ownership of TikTok and its user data poses a national security threat to the United States.
“Support for the TikTok bill is an IQ test” for members of Congress, Rabois wrote in an email to CNBC.
In February, Rabois donated $500,000 to the Congressional Leadership Fund, a political action committee that supports Republican House candidates, according to a statement from the Federal Election Commission.
Rabois’ threat could have significant influence on those Republican lawmakers still undecided about whether to support the bill.
For some supporters of the bill, the political calculus became more complicated last week, when former President Donald Trump announced his opposition to the measure. The presumptive Republican presidential nominee was joined by Tesla CEO and billionaire Elon Musk, who also criticized the legislation.
The bill’s prospects in the Senate were still uncertain Tuesday.
“In the Senate it will be up to the Democratic leader [Chuck Schumer] to bring him to the ground. If he does, we will have a clear voting record” of each senator’s position on the issue, Rabois told CNBC.
If the bill were to pass the Senate and become law, ByteDance would have just six months to sell TikTok before the app would be banned from American app stores and web hosting sites.
The CEO of Khosla Ventures, Rabois donated just over $41,000 in total last year to the National Republican Senatorial Committee. He has also donated more than $120,000 to the National Republican Congressional Committee, the House counterpart of the NRSC.
Rabois said whether or not he continues to support the NRCC will be partly tied to how the Republican leadership handles the next vote.
House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-Louisiana, has signaled he plans to vote for the measure, and Majority Leader Steve Scalise called it a “critical national security bill.”
Republican Whip Tom Emmer also supports the legislation, and presumed in March 2023 that TikTok was “nothing more than a CCP spy app, collecting sensitive information of 150 million American users that could then be exploited by the Chinese government.”
