Four years ago, one of Vice President Kamala Harris’s major donors—billionaire LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman—celebrated the IPO of Airbnb, a company in which he had invested heavily, by creating Monopoly boards in which the game’s “jail” was replaced by “government regulation.”
Since Harris became the Democratic presidential nominee, many billionaire tech investors have decided to support her campaign. While they often praise Harris as a business-friendly politician, they have been vocal in their distaste for Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan’s antitrust agenda. Hoffman is one of the most influential donors in this group. He has donated tens of millions of dollars to support the Biden and Harris campaigns and has organized other wealthy tech investors to do so.
When Airbnb went public in December 2020, the company was valued at over $47 billion. Hoffman sent at least a handful of other investors a Monopoly-style board game titled “Airbnopoly,” according to photos of the game obtained by WIRED. A top Airbnb investor confirmed that he was one of several people who received the game from Hoffman and his investment firm Greylock Partners.
The box is labeled “a Reid Hoffman and Greylock production” and contains all the elements typically found in a classic board game, such as cards, dice and game pieces – all with a travel theme. Instead of a top hat or a thimble, players can move around the board using an airplane seat, a golf club, flip-flops, and so on. The spaces on the board are also adjusted to include airports instead of railroads and Airbnb locations instead of Atlantic City streets. In one telling modification, instead of the “Go to Jail” space, the board tells players to return to the corner “Government Regulations” space. If players avoid government regulation, they move along a path titled “Progress”.
Some spaces on the board require players to pay government-imposed fines, taxes, or trust and security fees. “Recent events in American politics make us curious about life in Canada,” we read on one of the game cards.
Airbnbopoly is clearly more of a novelty gift than a screed against massive government. “Reid is a huge fan of board games, he played Settlers of Catan and so on for many, many years, so he created a custom board game called Settlers of Silicon Valley and gave it to many friends,” says Aria Finger, podcast co-host and Hoffman’s chief of staff he told WIRED. “At the time, Airbnb thought a custom game would be a nice, unique gesture, and the Monopoly board would easily lend itself to a variety of Airbnb rentals, so he went for it.”
Still, it became public at a time when Hoffman and his Silicon Valley contemporaries were calling for Khan’s firing under a possible Harris administration.
Since Khan was confirmed as chairman in 2021, the FTC has begun going after tech giants like Hurry upN, GoogleAND Meta for possible anti-competitive behavior. Many of these lawsuits have failed and others are ongoing. Khan’s biggest victory came in August, when a judge found that Google maintained an illegal monopoly in the online search market.
In 2016, Hoffman sold LinkedIn to Microsoft and serves on the company’s board of directors. Microsoft is is reportedly currently under investigation by the FTC as part of the inquiry into cooperation and investment in artificial intelligence. A spokesman for Hoffman did not immediately respond to a request for comment.