The Sunday Mail
THE biggest donor in this US election cycle is Jeffrey Yass, a libertarian trading firm owner who started off as a professional poker player and is now a major investor in TikTok’s Chinese owner ByteDance.
Philadelphia-based Yass has donated more than US$46 million to Republican causes so far in the 2024 election cycle, data from political donations tracker OpenSecrets shows.
The funds have gone to support former rivals of Donald Trump for the Republican presidential nomination, as well as a raft of groups supporting school choice, programmes that use taxpayer dollars to send students to private and religious schools.
Yass, 65, was thrust into the spotlight this month after Trump, the Republican presidential candidate, reversed course on his preference for banning TikTok, saying that a ban would hurt some children and only strengthen Meta Platforms’ Facebook.
Trump made the comments days after he met Yass at a gathering of the conservative Club for Growth donor group in Florida.
The U-turn on TikTok amid a major cash crunch led to speculation that Trump may be trying to court Yass.
Trump says the pair only met for “a few minutes”, and did not discuss TikTok but instead talked about education.
Trump has been significantly outraised on funding by Democratic President Joe Biden and faces hostility from many traditional Republican donors, all while scrambling for money to pay off around a half-billion dollars in legal judgments.
Yass, who leads Pennsylvania-based trading firm Susquehanna International Group and whose net worth Forbes puts at around US$27 billion, has not donated to Trump.
He did, however, give money to support four of Trump’s former opponents for the Republican presidential nomination: Entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, Senator Tim Scott and former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, a major Trump critic.
Yass has not previously donated to Trump.
A spokesperson for Yass declined to comment for this article.
Yass’ political contributions have soared from the levels he spent in previous elections, OpenSecrets data shows.
In the entire 2016 election cycle, for example, Yass and his wife donated just over US$5 million — a ninth of his donations in the current cycle, which wraps up with the November 5 general election.
His donations this cycle have included some US$16 million to the Club for Growth Action, a super PAC funding group linked to the fiscally conservative Club for Growth non-profit.
The Club for Growth is also against the TikTok ban.
To be sure, Yass and the Club for Growth have over the years also donated to many members of Congress who support banning TikTok, including Republican Senator Marco Rubio.
