A Fourth of July social media post about Muslim politician Zohran Mamdani by a partner at a legendary Silicon Valley venture capital firm has the nation’s largest Muslim advocacy group calling for the investor’s firing.
Shaun Maguire, a self-professed supporter of Israel and President Donald Trump, and a partner at Sequoia Capital, posted on X that Mamdani, a New York legislator and upstart Democratic candidate for mayor of New York City, “comes from a culture that lies about everything.” Maguire added, “It’s literally a virtue to lie if it advances his Islamist agenda.”
Later that day on X, commenting on a video showing Mamdani leading chants calling for a “free Palestine” and a ceasefire in the Israel-Hamas war, Maguire, who is Jewish, wrote, “There are hundreds of millions of people whose #1 objective is ending Israel; then America.”
The posts drew widespread criticism, and on Thursday, the Council on American-Islamic Relations demanded that Sequoia — founded in 1972 and an investor in many of the world’s most successful technology companies including Apple, Google and NVIDIA — give Maguire the boot.
“Maguire’s documented rhetoric poses a clear ethical and reputational risk to Sequoia Capital and the communities it claims to serve, and as a result, we call on you to take immediate and decisive action to terminate his partnership with your firm,” CAIR wrote in a letter Thursday to Sequoia partner Roelof Botha. A press release from CAIR described Maguire’s comments as “racist” and “anti-Muslim.”
CAIR’s executive director for the Bay Area, Zahra Billoo called Maguire’s comments bigoted and dangerous.
“They echo the same Islamophobic tropes that have fueled harassment, discrimination, and violence against Muslims in this country for decades,” Billoo said in a statement Thursday. “Sequoia cannot continue to remain silent while one of its partners openly dehumanizes an entire faith community.”
Menlo Park-based Sequoia did not immediately respond to requests for comment from this news organization.
Maguire is one of several influential Silicon Valley figures who have unabashedly embraced conservative politics in a region known for liberalism. Like fellow venture capitalist David Sacks — a tech adviser to Trump — and Tesla, X and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, Maguire has used social media to broadcast right-wing ideas and attack ideological foes.
Maguire responded to questions from this news organization by providing links to X posts he made about Mamdani. In one of them, from July 6, Maguire posted a video of himself, suggesting he was a victim of cancel culture because “a large fraction of the internet” was calling him a racist.
In a July 5 post, Maguire wrote that Mamdani “is an Islamist” — a term generally understood to mean an advocate for government and society ordered in accordance with laws prescribed by Islam.
Maguire claimed in the video that 90% of people who started Students for Justice in Palestine chapters years ago — as Mamdani did — are Islamists. But, he said, “it is not clear” whether Mamdani is an Islamist.
Mamdani’s campaign office did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Maguire said on the video that when he referred to “a culture that lies about everything,” he was referring to Islamists purportedly abusing a concept of Islam to “justify lying if it advances their own agenda.”
Maguire apologized to “any Muslim that is not an Islamist,” saying, “I am very, very sorry. I am not trying to stoke hatred.”
He closed his video with the Arabic “peace be upon you” greeting.
“Salaam aleikum,” Maguire said.
However, on Thursday, Maguire took a more combative tone, posting on X that “some of the biggest left-wing names in Silicon Valley” were coming after him “behind the scenes.” These were, he asserted, “the people that turned (Silicon Valley) into a toxic cesspool of political correctness and cancel culture.”
Maguire also took aim at CAIR’s Bay Area head Billoo, posting a screen shot of a 2014 social media post in which she said, “We will not renounce jihad, khilafah or sharia,” referring to the Arabic words for struggle, a divine Islamic government, and Islamic religious law.
Billoo on Thursday shared an X post by left-wing writer and broadcaster Mehdi Hasan about a reported letter circulating in support of Maguire, with hundreds of signatures.
“Masks off,” Hasan wrote, “hoods on.”
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