GoDaddy billionaire Bob Parsons photographed for Forbes in 2017. Parsons and his wife reside in Arizona but decided to recently donate to Caitlyn Jenner's campaign for California governor.
Tim Pannell for ForbesGoDaddy founder Bob Parsons and his wife gave $64,800 to Caitlyn Jenner’s campaign for California governor last week, according to a public filing released Tuesday.
“We didn’t make the donation for political reasons, however. The reason we did it is we have been friends with Caitlyn for some time,” Parsons told Forbes. “This was a gesture of support.”
The contribution qualified as the largest that Jenner’s campaign has disclosed since April, when she announced her campaign to challenge Governor Gavin Newsom. Only 16 others have given more than $5,000, based on the most recent California filings. The top 18 donors’ contributions add up to just $212,405. Still, the $64,800 wasn’t much money for Parsons, who founded the business that became web-hosting giant GoDaddy in 1997. He sold his remaining stake in GoDaddy three years ago and today is worth an estimated $2.2 billion.
Jenner, an Olympian and reality TV star who came out as a transgender woman in 2015, is so far one of more than 30 people to file a statement of intention to run for California governor. A few days after Jenner, who is running as a Republican, announced her campaign last month, the California Secretary of State said enough people had signed a petition to warrant a recall election. The state is now in the middle of a 30-business-day period when people who signed the petition can withdraw their signatures. If the recall effort goes through, California voters will have the option to vote on whether Newsom should be removed from office, and who should replace him. A recent poll from UC Berkeley showed that just 6% of survey participants said they would vote for Jenner to replace Newsom.
Parsons said he first met Jenner about five years ago. The entrepreneur, who lives in Arizona, said that he and his wife are both registered as independents, although federal filings show they donated more than $250,000 to help Arizona Republican Martha McSally in her 2018 and 2020 Senate campaigns, both of which she lost. Parsons also contributed to the effort supporting Governor Gavin Newsom’s recall, even before backing Jenner. Public filings show he donated $5,000 in December to a committee that was funding the circulation of the petition to recall Newsom.
“When the recall effort for Governor Newsom started gaining a foothold,” Parsons explained, “we talked to a number of our friends in California, who were distraught about the way the pandemic was being managed.”
