Microsoft, Google folks are top sources for Obama funds
Democratic President Barack Obama gets campaign support from the tech community while Republican challenger Mitt Romney courts Wall Street.
President Obama's campaign is getting financial help from people associated with two big tech firms: Microsoft and Google.
Following the University of California, those companies were listed as the second and third top contributors to his re-election campaign by OpenSecrets.org, followed by the lawfirm of DLA Piper and Harvard University.
Mitt Romney's list is a who's who of Wall Street: Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan Chase, Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, and Credit Suisse Group.
The money did not come from the organizations themselves, but from political action committees, individual employees, owners, and family members, and includes subsidiaries and affiliates, the site says.
Overall, Obama has raised $348.4 million compared with $193.4 million for Romney.
Obama's ties to the tech community go back to his first presidential campaign, when then Google CEO Eric Schmidt (now executive chairman) campaigned for him, and served as an adviser. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer also backed Obama four years ago.
After the election, several Googlers left the company to join the Obama administration, Schmidt became a member of the Transition Economic Advisory Board and he and Craig Mundie, chief research and strategy officer at Microsoft, were named to the president's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology. The University of California was at the top of Obama's contributor list in the 2008 campaign too, followed by Goldman Sachs, Harvard, Microsoft, Google, JP Morgan Chase and Citigroup.