Who is Eric Jones?  A summary of the series with a quick wrap-up.

By Roberta Millstein

Who is Eric Jones?  I started with one article and didn’t know I’d be writing a series of them, addressing:

1. Large numbers of maximized campaign contributions from Eric Jones’s former venture capitalist colleagues at Dragoneer Investment Group and other individuals from the high tech industry (link here).  The money comes from out of the district and so does Jones.
   
2. Jones’s close connections to a Super PAC, New Leadership Now, that is pouring huge sums of money into his run for Congress (link here).
   
3. Some of the Super PAC’s blatantly false claims about Thompson (link here).
   
4. An update reflecting that the Super PAC spent $1.1 million on ads, including an Orwellian mailer, although as of May 30 that number exceeds $2.4 million. I have no doubt there will be  more on the way (link here).
   
5. The extremely unlikely claim that Jones is a progressive, given his maximized donation to Republican Jonathan Bush, cousin of GW Bush, who is running for governor in Maine, with problematic views on health care, AI, and the environment — views that Jones seems to share. (link here).

Beyond these articles, there are just a few more points than I want to emphasize:

• Jones was a partner at Dragoneer, not a mere employee.  A partner is not even technically an employee; it’s an owner. He is responsible for the decisions the firm made.
  
• According to the Thompson campaign, Jones’s “own disclosure report shows he still has up to $30 million invested with his company [Dragoneer], and it continues to pay him $1 million… It raises concerns about his conflicts of interest.”
  
• Dragoneer has invested in Anthropic, the artificial intelligence company. As is well known, AI not only uses massive amounts of energy, it also guzzles massive amount of water.  This has led to growth in data centers, such as those now proposed for California Forever — perhaps something that Jones supports?
  
• Anthropic Nears Trillion-Dollar Valuation After Its Latest Funding Round:. Dragoneer is one of the firms leading the new investment round.
  
• Jones own website asserts that he does not want state regulation of AI — like Republicans, he calls these “patchwork” regulations — but instead wants federal regulation.  In our current federal climate, that amounts to no regulation at all.  Even Marjorie Taylor Greene was concerned about it.

Donald Trump’s sons are young.  JD Vance came from a family that took public assistance.  John Fetterman ran as a progressive.  Being a young person who comes from a family who relied on public assistance and who espouses progressive ideas is no guarantee at all that the person will actually govern as a progressive, especially with these kinds of big money connections and no political track record.

Follow the money.  Do not vote for Eric Jones.  He has all the marks of a Trojan Horse for the high tech industry.