LinkedIn co-founder draws Republican ire over ‘martyr’ comment about Trump before attack

Reid Hoffman, one of the Democratic Party’s biggest and most influential donors, on Sunday pushed back on criticisms from the right about a recent comment that he had made at a closed-door conference in which he seemed to suggest that Donald Trump should be made into a “martyr.”

Hoffman, a co-founder of LinkedIn, appeared at a media mogul conference in Sun Valley, Idaho, last week, several days before the assassination attempt on Trump on Saturday. A report from the conference by Puck, citing accounts from attendees, said that Hoffman was discussing his work funding several lawsuits involving Trump when he told Peter Thiel, a tech billionaire and Republican megadonor, “I wish I had made him an actual martyr.”

That report yielded a chorus of condemnations after the attack on Trump, as his allies drew attention to several comments from Democrats, including some from President Joe Biden, that used what the right views as violent rhetoric against Trump. One person who drew attention to Hoffman’s comments was Elon Musk — a close friend of Hoffman’s since their days together at PayPal — who has been increasingly sending his ire online toward Hoffman.

Hoffman said Sunday that his conference remarks had been taken out of context and offered a clarification.

“At a recent business conference, Peter Thiel said that my lawsuit work against Trump was ‘turning a clown into a martyr.’ In that context, I replied that I wished that Trump would martyr himself — meaning let himself be held accountable — for his assaults on and lies about women,” Hoffman said. “Of course I meant nothing about any sort of physical harm or violence, which I categorically deplore. I meant and mean accountability to the rule of law.”

Hoffman, Thiel and Musk are known in Silicon Valley to be provocative communicators. Hoffman’s top political aide, Dmitri Mehlhorn, drew some scrutiny on his own Saturday when he sent an email to several reporters encouraging them to consider the possibility, in the immediate aftermath of the shooting, that it had been possibly staged, an idea that there is no evidence to support. Mehlhorn on Sunday apologized for the note and endorsed Hoffman’s public position.