FTC Chair Lina Khan's Fight For American Genomics Industry Against Incestuous Illumina Part 2
Just how China-compromised is Illumina chairman John W. Thompson?
We are doing a series on the China-compromising of John W. Thompson and Francis DeSouza, the chairman and CEO of Illumina. The information herein presented is not investment advice but it is well formed analysis from years of study and attention. It’s critically important that America control the commanding heights of the new economy.
To understand why Illumina might have been Chinese-compromised it helps to understand the past ties of Illumina’s leadership with Microsoft. In my opinion the best book on the issue of zero days in our Microsoft products was written by Nicole Perlroth. I’ve covered the subject here. Zero days are, of course, how a lot of technology is transferred to foreign hostile regimes.
I’ve written quite a lot on this Substack about Microsoft’s history and its problems. It’s our assessment that Microsoft was Chinese and Israeli penetrated some time ago and that it has lost many government contracts as a result. It needs new ways of juicing its stock price. Hence AI.
My team and I also correctly predicted (or was it influenced?) the decision by the UK anti-trust authorities to block the Activision-Open AI deal.
We also don’t believe that the Microsoft-Open AI pairing will do well, given that it seems to have been orchestrated by Reid Hoffman who acts as a kind of proxy between the Chinese and American deep states. Hoffman serves as a mentor to Sam Altman, the CEO of Open AI. This is an especial key detail as we confront who the alleged new investors are in OpenAI — Sequoia and Andreessen Horowitz. Both firms have especially close ties to China.
Microsoft
In February 2012, shortly after leaving Symantec in October 2011, Thompson became an independent director at Microsoft. In February 2014, he became the Chairman of the Board following Bill Gates stepping down from the role. He was also in charge of the search for a new CEO to replace Steve Ballmer, a role he handed to Satya Nadella who also succeeded Thompson as the chair of the board of Microsoft in 2011.
The significance of this is that Microsoft’s closeness to the CCP is hard to overstate, with members of the CCP often singing Microsoft’s praises and conspicuously visiting the Microsoft headquarters.
Former Chinese premier Hu Jintao visits Bill Gates before visiting then president George W. Bush, 2006.
Xi Jinping, President of the CCP; Wang Huning, leading CCP theorist; Li Zhanshu, former chairman of the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress; Yang Jiechi, Director of the Office of the Central Foreign Affairs Commission; and others visit Microsoft, September 2015. Bill Gates and John W. Thompson in the background, Satya Nadella in the foreground.
Bill Gates and his replacement as chairman, John W. Thompson, await Xi Jinping’s arrival. Microsoft headquarters, 2015.
John W. Thompson looks on as Xi Jinping shakes hands with Xi Jinping with Satya Nadella, his chosen CEO, is present. Microsoft headquarters, 2015.
Lightspeed Venture Partners
In addition to co-running a company with the head of Huawei (which has been banned in multiple western states on spying concerns), and being a key member of the board for Microsoft (a company that is so close to the CCP that it receives visits from the president of China), Thompson is also a venture partner at Light Speed Ventures Partners (LSV).
LSV has extensive investments in China in areas of national security, such as in the semiconductor industry. A WSJ investigation found that LSV, along with Sequoia Capital China and other Silicon Valley investment firms has engaged in widespread, and troubling, funding of this area.
Interestingly, Snapchat, one of the biggest successes of LSV, was the first company to be jointly invested in by Alibaba and Tencent holdings.
LSV was headed, until recently by Jeremy Liew and it is therefore unsurprising that Thompson would be present at this company. According to Liew, he and Thompson have been friends since 2007 when Thompson held a fundraiser for Barack Obama. Liew with Obama. John W. Thompson’s house, 2007.
Liew stepped back from investing in 2021 for unclear reasons but we’re told it has a lot to do with his China exposure. A colleague of Liew told me of his penchant for strip clubs.
When I met Liew in 2016 he made no secret of his ties to the Chinese.
A failed bid as Obama’s commerce secretary
In addition to the various business ties to China enjoyed John W. Thompson, he also appear to have had political aspirations that have links to the Chinese state, too. In the 2008- 2009 period, Thompson was involved in a failed attempt at becoming the commerce secretary under President Obama. It appears, from what has been publicly made available, that Thompson was Obama’s leading candidate for the role in 2008-2009. One of his leading, and vocal, supporters for the role of commerce secretary was Senator Barbara Boxer, who upon leaving office, became a registered foreign agent for Hikvision, a Chinese state sponsored surveillance company.
We can assume that Thompson failed the vetting process, and we can also make a very strong assumption that his closeness to China was a factor in this failure.
We didn’t even have to go there with the sketchy Chinese computer virus that was recently found during Thompson’s tenure. It just so happened that his firm Symantec had the cure!