From Bill Ackman to Stephen Schwarzman, why are American billionaires supporting Trump even after conviction?

The American billionaires are converging on former US President Donald Trump despite his conviction.

Trump on Thursday became the first President of the United States, sitting or former, to be convicted as a felon. He was convicted on all 34 counts in the ‘hush money case’ for falsifying business records to cover a $130,000 payment to adult actor Stormy Daniels to buy her silence regarding an alleged affair.

The conviction or the baggage that Trump carries, ranging from the January 6 attack on the US Capitol to three other cases against him, has not stopped American billionaires from coming to his support. While some have said they are disillusioned with President Joe Biden, other have said they are concerned about rising antisemitism in the country under his presidency.

Some of the figures who have pledged Trump have publicly rejected him in the post over his role in the January 6, 2021 attack on the US Capitol, but things have now changed and they have flocked to him again.

Here are American business leaders backing Trump

Trump’s supporters include some of the biggest American business leaders.

Last week, billionaire Steve Schwarzman, the Co-founder and CEO of Blackstone, said he will support Trump and will donate to him. Blackstone is an investment and real estate giant with a market cap of 144.27 billion, according to Yahoo Finance. It has assets under management of more than $1 trillion.

Omeed Malik, President of 1789 Capital, has also supported Trump. He is one of the leaders of a fundraiser at New York for Trump where donations of up to $25 million were sought, as per a report.

Robert Bigelow, the owner of Bigelow Aerospace and Budget Suites of America, has also supported Trump. He has even paid Trump $1 million for his legal fees, as per Reuters.

Billionaire Bill Ackman, the CEO of hedge fund Pershing Square, has said he will not vote for Biden and has indicated he is backing Trump. He denounced Biden as a wave of anti-Israel protests swept across the United States which many criticised as being antisemitic. Blackstone CEO Schwarzman also mentioned antisemitism as one of the reasons for backing Trump.

Jamie Dimon, the Chairman and CEO of JPMorgan Chase, has also indicated his support for Trump in recent days.

Trump has also been increasingly finding support among venture capitalists in the Silicon Valley, which has long been a bastion of Democrats, according to The New York Times.

Among the Silicon Valley-based VCs, David Sacks and Chamath Palihapitiya of Social Capital have supported Trump, as per The Times.

While Tesla and SpaceX boss Elon Musk has said he will support a candidate in the 2024 US presidential election, The Wall Street Journal has reported that he has become close with Trump in recent months and is holding multiple private telephonic conversations with him in a month.

Why are US business leaders supporting Trump?

While some billionaires have cited disillusionment with Biden’s policies and the rising antisemitism in the country as reasons for ditching him to support Trump, commentators have said the major reason is Trump’s proposed tax cuts.

Some of these business leaders have harshly criticised Trump in recent years. Following the January 6 attack on the US Capitol, JPMorgan Chase boss Dimon said he “strongly condemn the violence in our nation’s capital” and “our elected leaders have a responsibility to call for an end to the violence” and accept the election results. Blackstone boss Schwarzman called it “an affront to the democratic values we hold dear as Americans” and later said he would not back Trump.

Now, however, Schwarzman has said the US under Biden was heading in the “wrong direction”. He further said that the “dramatic rise of antisemitism” made him to support Trump.

“I share the concern of most Americans that our economic, immigration, and foreign policies are taking the country in the wrong direction. For these reasons, I am planning to vote for change and support Donald Trump for President. In addition, I will be supporting Republican Senate candidates and other Republicans up and down the ticket,” said Schwarzman in a statement, as per Axios.

Writing in The New Republic, Timothy Noah highlighted that the issue of antisemitism does not entirely address the support for Trump as he has been associated with the movement for years.

“Trump ran an antisemitic ad in 2016; that same year Trump recycled a white supremacist image showing a Jewish star atop a pile of money; Trump equivocated in 2017 about neo-Nazi marchers in Charlottesville; Trump dined in 2022 with the Holocaust denier and white supremacist Nick Fuentes, who’s demanded that Jews leave the country; and just last week Trump’s campaign posted a graphic that alluded to the ‘creation of a unified reich’,” said Noah in an article.

Whitney Tilson, who previously ran hedge fund Kase Capital Management, told Bloomberg that business leaders were supporting Trump out of self-interest.

“For people in the investing business, the Joe Biden presidency has been extraordinarily good for them. It’s indeed puzzling to me how the very people who’ve done the best under Joe Biden seem to be the most dissatisfied with this presidency…They’ve concluded Trump is going to win and if he’s the next president, then it’s in their self-interest to support him early,” said Tilson.

Most surveys so far have shown that Trump will the US presidential election.