Not a Single HP Employee Reported Donating to Carly Fiorina's Campaign
Given her lack of any real political experience, former candidate for senator of California and current republican candidate for president Carly Fiorina has been touting (what she claims to be) her revered and profitable tenure as former HP CEO as a sign of what she could do for the nation if given the chance. Which is why it’s too bad that, of the 302,000 current HP employees, not a single one has donated a reportable amount to Carly Fiorina’s campaign.
As The Daily Beast discovered, the recent FEC filings (which list all candidate contributions over $200) show a noticeable lack of any general employee contribution. From The Daily Beast:
HP’s corporate leadership also doesn’t seem keen on the idea of Fiorina in the White House. Among the 12-member board of directors, just one, Ann Livermore, has given a donation above that threshold.
Also missing from the donor list are current CEO (and former GOP gubernatorial candidate) Meg Whitman, any members of the senior leadership team, and all but one member of the HP Board during Fiorina’s tenure there from 1999 to 2005. Tom Perkins, a venture capitalist and former board member who voted to fire Fiorina in 2005, has since had a change of heart and donated $25,000 to CARLY for America, the super PAC supporting her.
This certainly seems odd, considering Fiorina claimed at the most recent GOP debate that during her tenure as HP CEO, “We doubled the size of the company, we quadrupled its top-line growth rate, we quadrupled its cash flow, we tripled its rate of innovation.” But as Donald Trump (mostly correctly!) pointed out, these are the things that happen when you acquire a very large competitor—as HP did with Compaq under Fiorina’s leadership. Dell CEO Michael Dell has referred to this as “the dumbest deal of the decade.”
It’s been long understood that Fiorina was an absolutely awful manager who was widely despised (understandable after firing nearly 30,000 employees) by the company from which she was eventually fired in 2005 (then and only then, did the company start to increase in value). Which is likely why HP’s PAC donated thousands to Fiorina’s opponent in her run for Senator back in 2010.
The Daily Beast spoke to a former HP employee, who explained that, “My thoughts are no employee would donate to her campaign, ever,” he said. “She is a terrible leader, really, really bad. As bad as they come.”
Well, at least she always has her Planned Parenthood fan fiction to fall back on.
