Meet Shaun Maguire, the multi-millionaire tech VC embracing anti-Muslim, anti-Palestinian hate as Silicon Valley pours money into US and Israeli defense startups.

Taylor Lorenz

Shaun Maguire speaks during the Hill & Valley Forum in Washington, DC, on April 30, 2025. Photo by Brendan Smialowski/AFP via Getty Images

At 10:00 am on July 4, while many people in the US were preparing to pop some burgers on the grill and celebrate the birth of America, Shaun Maguire, the multi-millionaire general partner at Sequoia Capital, one of the most esteemed venture capital firms in Silicon Valley, was rage-tweeting.

“[Zohran] Mamdani comes from a culture that lies about everything,” he posted. “It’s literally a virtue to lie if it advances his Islamist agenda. The West will learn this lesson the hard way.”

Maguire was alluding to a deeply misleading and inflammatory article in the New York Times that published hacked material from 2009 revealing that Mamdani had checked the “Asian” and “African American” boxes on his application to Columbia University, handwriting “Ugandan” to reflect his Ugandan‑born Indian heritage. The Times article relied primarily on Jordan Lasker, a race‑science proponent, as the source. Mamdani told the New York Times that he was simply trying to convey his complex identity, not mislead anyone or gain an improper advantage. Mamdani did not get accepted to Columbia.

Maguire lives in the Bay Area, but has tweeted incessantly about Mamdani since the progressive leader won the New York City Democratic mayoral primary last month. He has repeatedly falsely claimed that Mamdani, who is Muslim and has faced a tidal wave of Islamophobia since his win, is a radical Islamist. (Mamdani marched in NYC’s Pride parade just last week, proudly waving a trans rights flag and has a close partnership with Brad Lander, New York City’s Jewish comptroller, who endorsed him in the primary race.) Maguire also published a post on the Fourth of July, implying that “ending America” is a “religious goal” for Mamdani. “Mamdani is a new strain of Islamism, mutated to be more palatable for the Western mind,” Maguire posted.

The fact that Maguire can make such extremely racist and Islamophobic comments publicly about a major American political figure shows how deeply anti-Muslim bigotry has become embedded in Silicon Valley culture. Silicon Valley billionaires are now openly embracing anti-Muslim hate as they pivot toward defense startups that profit from perpetual war and the genocide in Palestine. The US war machine is structurally dependent on Islamophobia to justify decades of military intervention and surveillance, and, as Silicon Valley becomes even more intertwined with the defense sector, extremists like Maguire will likely only obtain more power and influence.

Vocal Defender of Israel

Maguire has deep ties to the US military-industrial complex. Prior to his VC career, he worked on classified projects of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in Afghanistan. He leveraged his military connections to co-found Qadium, a DARPA-backed company that claimed to index all devices connected to the internet, with a former CIA agent. The company was started with $6 million in seed funding from Peter Thiel.

Like many Silicon Valley leaders with ties to defense tech, Maguire is also a vocal defender of Israel. He identifies as a staunch Zionist and uses his platform on X to push pro-Zionist propaganda and disinformation. He has spread blatant lies about activists, including the false conspiracy theory that the Columbia University chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine knew about the October 7 Hamas attack before it happened. Maguire is also an outspoken fan of Tommy Robinson, a far-right British anti-Islam activist and conspiracy theorist.

Maguire has amplified the Pallywood conspiracy theory, racist propaganda that falsely accuses Palestinians of faking their deaths and wounds from Israel’s attacks. He falsely claimed that a dead Palestinian baby was just a doll and encouraged his followers to search the term Pallywood on X.

More recently, he has been denying the slaughter of innocent Palestinians at US-Israel-backed aid centers. On July 4, just hours after his post about Mamdani, Maguire posted an image of an old Washington Post retraction about a completely unrelated incident that cropped out the original date, trying to cast doubt on the recent aid site killings. Israeli soldiers have admitted to multiple massacres at humanitarian aid centers in reports published in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz and the Associated Press. Maguire was responding on X to Amjad Masad, one of the few Palestinian and Muslim tech CEOs in the Valley, who recently discussed the Gaza humanitarian aid site massacres on Joe Rogan’s podcast. Masad replied to Maguire on X, saying that Maguire’s posts were a “slanderous lie.”

Maguire spent three weeks in Israel last summer with the Israeli military, posting that “The generation fighting this war will be Israel’s greatest generation since [David] Ben Gurion and Golda Meir’s.” He has also played a key role in tightening the firm’s relationship with the Israeli defense tech industry.

In March, Maguire touted his firm’s investment in Kela, a Tel Aviv-based startup founded by four veterans of Israel’s most elite intelligence units, like 8200 and Talpiot. Kela’s goal is to “leverage Israel’s unique cadre of ‘technowarriors’ to help defend the Western world order.” Sequoia led Kela’s entire $11 million seed round and helped the company raise over $100 million from investors, including the CIA. In addition to doing “border protection” work, Kela’s long-term ambition “is to convert Israel into a defense tech hub for Western militaries,” according to a post co-authored by Maguire on the Sequioa blog.

Sequoia has backed a slew of Israeli military-affiliated tech companies. The firm funded Wiz, a cloud security company founded by alumni of the Israeli military unit 8200, Cyera, a Tel‑Aviv data security firm, Eon, a cloud infrastructure company whose founder was part of the first class of Aram, an elite Israeli military research program, and Decart, an AI company that was co-founded by two former members of the Israeli military unit 8200.

Sequoia, like many other Silicon Valley firms, has also recently begun investing more heavily in defense tech, which Maguire has played a key role in. Maguire co-authored a piece on Sequioa’s blog announcing its investment in Mach Industries in 2023, which Sequioa has described as a “defense company for the post-unmanned world.”

Sequoia declined to comment for this piece.

Supporter of Trump and Musk

Despite his false claims about Mamdani being from “a culture that lies about everything,” Maguire has been a steadfast supporter of President Donald Trump. He donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to Trump’s reelection campaign in 2024 and has championed Elon Musk and his efforts at the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).

After Musk was accused of doing a Nazi salute on stage in January, Maguire rushed to his defense, condemning anyone who implied that Musk supported antisemitism. According to a study by the Network Contagion Research Institute (NCRI), antisemitic tweets skyrocketed by 136% following Musk’s takeover of the platform. In 2023, Musk called an antisemitic post on the platform “the actual truth.”

Maguire leveraged his relationship with Musk to personally secure Starlink satellite internet access for the Israeli military within days of the October 7 attack, right as Israel began to invade Gaza. It took Maguire “12 hours, maybe less, to get Starlink switched on over Israel,” Israeli venture capitalist Aviv Eyal said in May.

Maguire has also previously spread other racist lies and conspiracy theories. He spent weeks falsely claiming that Haitians were stealing people’s pets and eating them. He implied that there was a Democrat conspiracy to leverage the census to consolidate power in blue states. In February, he amplified a Libs of TikTok lie that Stacey Abrams had somehow laundered $2 billion from the government. He frequently boosts extreme far-right accounts like End Wokeness, which traffic in political disinformation and racist conspiracy theories.

When Anti-Muslim Hate Becomes Profitable

After Maguire’s posts about Mamdani on the Fourth of July, many non-white Silicon Valley startup founders and tech workers reported feeling alienated and dismayed. “I’m a YC/VC-backed founder, building is hard enough without tech cheering on open racism,” Ayman Nadeem, founder and CEO of AI startup Nuanced, posted to X. “Saying vile things about Muslims + Arabs is now seen as ‘edgy’ in VC Twitter. It’s not. It’s just bigotry.”

“Shaun has gone from laundering atrocities abroad to spreading racist lies and dumb + self-fulfilling ‘clash of civilizations’ narrative at home,” said Taimur Abdaal, co-founder of Casual, a finance planning tool. “All perfectly acceptable, even ‘based’ discourse in tech now.”

“Imagine being a Muslim founder trying to get funded by Sequoia and to have to read this racist shit,” Armand Domalewski, a data scientist in the Bay Area posted. Others noted that Sumaiya Balbale, the COO & Operating Partner at Sequoia, wears a hijab.

Maguire claimed on Twitter that he didn’t mean “all Muslims.” Responding to one critic, he wrote:

“You’re extrapolating that I meant all Muslims

When in the Tweet I said ‘Islamists’

Which is a political ideology, and a small subset of Muslims

I should have been more clear in my tweet but the culture I was referring to was ‘Islamists’”

As firms like Sequoia pour more money into US and Israeli military-linked startups, the incentives for Islamophobic fear-mongering are only growing. The Silicon Valley tech industry is becoming more and more aligned with the US war machine, and figures like Maguire are at the center of this shift, leveraging anti-Muslim racism to justify their investments in dystopian militarized tech and imperial violence. The new Silicon Valley regime is based on military domination and racial hierarchies, and under this new system, anti-Muslim hate is profitable.

Taylor Lorenz, author of the new Zeteo column, ‘Network Effect,’ is an acclaimed tech and online culture journalist. For more of Taylor’s writing, subscribe to her Substack, User Mag.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect those of Zeteo.

The article appeared in Zeteo.