Kleiner Perkins Co-Founder’s Nazi Comment Draws Criticism

Venture capital pioneer Tom Perkins is taking heat from the firm he co-founded and Silicon Valley peers alike after comparing today’s treatment of wealthy Americans to the persecution of Jews in Nazi Germany.

Perkins, 82, wrote in a three-paragraph letter in the Jan. 25 Wall Street Journal that resentment of the very rich in the U.S. amounts to a “progressive war on the American one percent” paralleling attacks on Jews in the 1930s. Perkins, who co-founded Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers in 1972, said the “Occupy movement,” outrage about Google Inc.’s busing of employees from San Francisco to Silicon Valley and the anger over rising real estate prices represents a “very dangerous drift in our American thinking.”