Tech billionaire and ‘Pedo Island’ guest exposed funneling money to very top of Democratic Party

A billionaire who has admitted visiting Jeffrey Epstein’s ‘Pedophile Island’ after the notorious predator was put on the sex offender registry is funding a conference for top Democrats, the Daily Mail can reveal. 

Reid Hoffman, 57, is the biggest donor to the Welcome Political Action Committee, a Democrat group which is using his money to throw ‘Welcome Fest’ in Washington, DC on Wednesday.

The event, which is designed to help centrist Democrats plan the future of the party, has a lineup of speakers including Senator Elissa Slotkin and members of congress including Jake Auchincloss, Jared Golden, Adam Gray, Marie Perez, Kristen Rivet, Tom Suozzi and Ritchie Torres.

Hoffman has given a total $1.8million to the PAC. His contributions made up 60 per cent of its income in the 2022 election cycle.

The LinkedIn co-founder, who is worth $2.4billion, visited Epstein’s private Caribbean island in 2014 and had a second trip planned that year including a flight together and an overnight stay at the pedophile’s New York townhouse. Both were key locations of Epstein’s alleged abuse of teenage girls. 

Hoffman’s association with the twisted financier came after Epstein pleaded guilty to soliciting and procuring a minor for prostitution in 2008.

His links with Epstein reportedly helped rehabilitate the financier’s reputation after his conviction, which he said he regrets.

The trip and plans were revealed by the Wall Street Journal in 2023 when the paper obtained thousands of pages of emails and schedules from 2013 to 2017 revealing Epstein’s links with rich, famous and politically connected elites.

Khadeeja Safdar, one of the reporters who broke the Journal story, also posted on X an excerpt from a message between Hoffman and another Silicon Valley investor, Peter Thiel, where Hoffman called Epstein ‘mostly fun’ but warned ‘you may find him perverse’. 

Hoffman told the Journal he only visited Epstein’s island residence, Little Saint James, once for a fundraising trip for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and that they last spoke in 2015.

‘It gnaws at me that, by lending my association, I helped his reputation, and thus delayed justice for his survivors,’ he told the Journal in 2023.

‘While I relied on MIT’s endorsement, ultimately I made the mistake,’ he added. ‘I am sorry for my personal misjudgment.’

Hoffman is known as a Democrat megadonor. He gave large sums to Kamala Harris’s 2024 campaign and to the pro-Harris Super Pac Future Forward.

He has given $1,826,000 to Welcome PAC to date, and gave $1.2million of the total $2million raised by the PAC in the 2022 election cycle.

The committee’s second biggest donor is James Murdoch, an heir to Rupert Murdoch’s media empire, who has given $1,250,000.

The PAC’s event Welcome Fest is scheduled for June 4 at the Hamilton Hotel in Washington, DC.

It is billed as ‘the largest public gathering of centrist Democrats’ on the event’s website, which describes ‘a showcase for the array of leaders and organizations cultivating a partisan centrist vision on the left.’

‘This year’s theme for Welcome Fest is “Responsibility to Win,” exploring the key places Democrats must take responsibility to regain voters’ trust and highlighting Party leaders who are best suited to shed light into how we do that,’ the site says.

The event has drawn criticism online from the left wing of the Democratic Party, with some activists calling it a ‘nightmare lineup’. One critic on X called it ‘a conference room of centrist consultants huffing their own farts’.

The original poster for the event also had a prominent typo where ‘responsibility’ appeared to be spelled ‘responsibittity’ that drew further criticism.

Welcome PAC spent $1,116,638.09 in 2024 supporting congressional campaigns for the Pennsylvania candidate Janelle Stelson, Washington’s Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, Wisconsin’s Rebecca Cooke, Kristen McDonald Rivet in Michigan’s 8th District, and Maine representative Jared Golden.

Cooke, one of the speakers at the conference, was slammed by her local Democrat colleagues in last year’s race for taking $170,000 ‘dark money’ from Welcome PAC for her campaign.

‘Rebecca Cooke in the 3rd Congressional District primary has broken our state’s clean campaign tradition,’ Wisconsin second district representative Mark Pocan told local news station WKOW in August.

Daily Mail has reached out to Hoffman, Welcome PAC, and Cooke for comment.  

Money from PACs is sometimes labelled ‘dark money’ due to the difficulty of tracing who exactly gave it to the candidate.

One of Cooke’s opponents in the Democratic primary for the House seat, Eric Wilson, also made a dig at her at the time.

‘I’m not relying on special interest money,’ Wilson told WKOW. 

‘Ninety-nine percent of my contributions are from individuals, and so I don’t need to have my message propped up by this big money.’

In response, Cooke’s campaign told WKOW she wanted to ‘enact campaign finance reform to reduce the influence of money in politics’.

‘When we lower the influence that wealthy elites and corporate special interests have in politics, more working-class people like Rebecca can step up to run and succeed,’ a campaign spokesperson said.

Welcome PAC also poured $597,408 into supporting California Democratic congressional candidate Will Rollins in the 2022 election.

The money totaled 76 per cent of Rollins’ campaign expenditure in the 2022 elections.

Rollins lost District 41 to Republican Ken Calvert in 2022 and 2024.