To Donald Trump, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos is a scammer; Mark Zuckerberg is pushing policies that would hurt women and minorities; and Apple is unpatriotic and deserves to be boycotted.

Much as Trump has excoriated immigrants, trashed his competitors and blasted the media, the bombastic, Twitter-wielding billionaire has unleashed a steady stream of invective at the tech sector — a problem, in the eyes of many Republicans, because it's precisely the industry they've been trying to win away from Democrats for years.


Trump's exact beef with the tech industry isn't always clear — nor are his plans for what he'd do to it. With Bezos, for example, Trump has, seemingly without provocation, chided his private ownership of The Washington Post as a way of "keeping taxes down at his no-profit company." Weeks later, the GOP front-runner took aim at Bezos again, issuing a cryptic threat that his companies would have "such problems" under a President Donald Trump.

Trump has also repeatedly taken shots at Apple after it refused to help federal investigators gain access to a password-protected iPhone tied to December’s terror-inspired mass shooting in San Bernardino, Calif. In calling for a boycott last month, Trump alleged that CEO Tim Cook took a stand against Washington only to "prove how liberal he is." And in the heat of his Super Tuesday victory speech, Trump again faulted the company, this time for manufacturing some of its products in China — vowing that “I’m going to get Apple to start making their computers and their iPhones on our land.”

His criticisms of Apple haven’t stopped Trump from using his iPhone to tweet shots at his rivals — though he’s previously threatened to switch full-time to his Samsung-made Android phone.

The tech industry's most prominent leaders — perhaps more accustomed to being celebrated on the campaign trail as part of what's right with America — seem at times unsure how to respond. Bezos at one point tweeted: "Finally trashed by @realDonaldTrump. Will still reserve him a seat on the Blue Origin rocket. #sendDonaldtospace," a reference to the aerospace company Bezos also owns. (Bezos, as well as Trump's other tech targets, did not comment for this story.)

But some Republicans closely tied to the tech industry are certain that Trump — if he's nominated — would prove damaging for their prospects in Silicon Valley and beyond.

"I don't know anyone in tech who's willing to say to my face that they're a Trump supporter," said Gary Shapiro, the leader of the Consumer Technology Association. A backer of Sen. Marco Rubio, Shapiro called Trump "the anti-tech guy."

The Trump campaign did not respond to a request for comment.

The GOP has angled for years to capture the same Silicon Valley cash and influence that helped Barack Obama win big in 2008 and 2012. But the region has been challenging terrain for conservatives. Even if the Bay Area's engineers and executives at times have a libertarian bent, they often side with Democrats, especially on social issues. Some of the Valley's elite figures, like Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg and Tesla CEO Elon Musk, have backed Hillary Clinton in 2016.

Republican candidates typically can count on a few well-heeled tech magnates, like Cisco Executive Chairman John Chambers and Hewlett Packard Enterprise chief Meg Whitman, for donations. But many of the GOP's leading funders have gravitated to Republicans other than Trump. Chambers has supported Rubio, and Whitman had backed Chris Christie before the New Jersey governor departed the race last month. Christie's subsequent endorsement of Trump, however, led the HP executive to blast both Republicans in a series of interviews last week — and she called Trump "unfit to be president."

For many in the tech industry, Trump's harsh — and, at times, inaccurate — rhetoric is to blame. When Washington debated the best way to stop terrorist groups like the Islamic State on social media late last year, Trump suggested Bill Gates help shut down the Internet — an idea that drew ridicule from tech experts.

Immigration has also pit Trump against much of the Valley, including Zuckerberg. The Facebook CEO has pushed Congress to expand the number of high-skilled foreign visas awarded each year, a position shared by one of Trump's competitors, Rubio, who introduced a bill to that effect. Trump slammed both of them on his campaign website, which said, "Mark Zuckerberg's personal Senator, Marco Rubio, has a bill to triple H-1Bs that would decimate women and minorities." (Trump later claimed he never said that.)

His stance on high-skilled visas has shifted repeatedly: After saying at Thursday night's GOP debate that he'd changed his mind, and lamented that foreign students who attend college in the U.S. get "shoved out" after they graduate, he reverted Friday morning to his earlier, hardline stance, saying he's committed to "eliminating rampant, widespread H-1B abuse" that's become a "cheap labor program." Still, his overall position on immigration — including his plans to build a wall on the Mexican border — have drawn sharp rebukes from groups like FWD.us, the political organization backed by Zuckerberg and other tech leaders.

Some tech-minded Republicans despair of the Trump phenomenon. His candidacy is "really disconcerting" to the "average thoughtful person in the technology community," said Garrett Johnson, the leader of the Lincoln Initiative, a group aimed at growing the ranks of Republicans in the Bay Area.

When Johnson's group convened top technologists and investors earlier this year, aiming to get an early readout on the 2016 race, there was palpable disappointment with Trump. Ted Ullyot, a partner at venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz and formerly a backer of Jeb Bush, said he had "never heard anybody say anything good about Trump, ever," a video of the event shows.

Fellow investor Michael Kim, managing partner at Cendana Capital, took it a step further. "Most of my friends think he's a f---ing idiot," he said.