Vinod Khosla: Silicon Valley’s persistent provocateur

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Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. One man who will be deeply disappointed with Donald Trump’s victorious run in the US presidential election will be Vinod Khosla. In the run-up to the elections, Khosla engaged in a bitter and public debate with Trump’s principal backer Elon Musk on the latter’s platform X, arguing that “No delusional person would be president, and this guy is certifiable with no values." For this, he invited abundant vitriol from Musk and criticism from a section of the Republican party which he had supported and voted for in the past before turning into an independent.

But Khosla has rarely been daunted by criticism. For the last 15 years, the billionaire investor has battled local people and the state government in San Francisco all the way to the US Supreme Court to restrict access to a beach near his home. Khosla claims that the fight to stop public access to the beach was a matter of principle and fairness.

The son of an Indian army officer, he became the symbol of immigrant Indian success in the US long before Indian-American business executives became the choice of American boardrooms. But it wasn’t a success-at-the-first attempt for the electrical engineering graduate from IIT Delhi. An initial venture in 1975 - a soy milk company to service people in India who did not have refrigerators - failed to take off.

It did little to douse his entrepreneurial impulses. Moving to the US on a full scholarship for his master’s degree in biomedical engineering from Carnegie Mellon University, he went on to do an MBA from the Stanford University Graduate School of Business. Even in this, he displayed doggedness (some call it cussedness), which is a feature of his life.