Reed Hastings, executive chairman of Netflix, has donated $7m in support of US vice president Kamala Harris’s presidential bid.
Hastings has donated the funds to a super PAC committee after Harris secured the backing of a majority of Democratic Party delegates on Monday, paving the way for her nomination at the party convention in Chicago running August 19-22.
The Information was the first to report the news on Tuesday.
The Netflix co-founder was one of many high-profile figures from entertainment and business to call for current US president Biden to end his re-election run in the upcoming November election following a disastrous debate in June against the Republican nominee and former president Donald Trump.
Biden announced last Sunday he would no longer be running for re-election. “Congrats to Kamal Harris – now it is time to win,” Hastings posted on X.
The donation comes after endorsements from the likes of George Clooney, who only two weeks ago wrote an op-ed piece in The New York Times urging Biden to step aside.
“President Biden has shown what true leadership is,” Clooney said on Tuesday in a statement issued to CNN. “He’s saving democracy once again. We’re all so excited to do whatever we can to support Vice President Harris in her historic quest.”
Others in Harris’s corner include media mogul Barry Diller, former Paramount chairman and CEO Sherry Lansing, and Universal Filmed Entertainment Group chairman Donna Langley, who joined Steven Spielberg and J.J. Abrams in supporting Harris’s short-lived presidential bid in 2019, when Biden won the Democratic party’s nomination.
Jeffrey Katzenberg, the DreamWorks Animation co-founder and Biden campaign co-chair who hosted a fundraising gala for the president in June (attended by Clooney) reportedly minimised concerns over the incumbent’s mental acuity and is yet to publicly endorse Harris.
Harris is a former attorney general of California, district attorney of San Francisco, and a senator. She has been a trailblazer throughout her career and is the first woman, Black American, and South Asian American to hold the office of vice president.
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