A Donald Trump presidency would be bad for the travel business and bad for the world, Expedia CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said at the GeekWire Summit 2016 Tuesday.
Khosrowshahi said Trump’s worldview and Expedia’s philosophy are diametrically opposed. Khosrowshahi said travel can help bring people together and break down barriers. Those are key tenets of Expedia’s mission, and ideals Khosrowshahi said Trump does not represent.
“I think where Trump just has it dead wrong is this is a world of us versus them,” Khosrowshahi said. “We don’t believe in a world of us versus them; we look at the world as all of us together.”
He said he is rooting for Hillary Clinton in the presidential election and that a Clinton presidency would be better for Expedia.
The Trump discussion was a small part of a wide-ranging interview with Khosrowshahi at the GeekWire Summit. He touched on Expedia’s company philosophies, its future plans for vacation rental service HomeAway and many other topics.
Khosrowshahi is the latest tech leader to come out against Trump. Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, Twitter co-founder Ev Williams, Expedia chairman Barry Diller, Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian and former Cisco Chief Technology and Strategy Officer and Microsoft board member Padmasree Warrior were among a group of tech luminaries who signed an open letter saying a Trump presidency would be a “a disaster for innovation.”
LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman said at TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco last month that he was in denial about the possibility of a Trump presidency, but “when I get out of denial, I think waking up in terror would actually in fact be an accurate statement.”
Hoffman published a viral post on Medium that offered up to $5 million to veterans if Trump releases his tax returns by the final presidential debate on Oct. 19.
Twenty-two years after founding Seattle-based RealNetworks as Progressive Networks, a website for liberal-minded content, CEO Rob Glaser created a website last month called PutinTrump.org. The goal of the news, analysis and opinion site is to shed light on what it calls “dangerous and unprecedented ties” between Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin.
At least one tech industry titan has Trump’s back: Peter Thiel. The controversial co-founder of PayPal and early Facebook investor spoke at the Republican National Convention in support of Trump, saying “he is a builder, and it’s time to rebuild America.”
