Dan O’Dowd is hardly the first California tech titan to bankroll his own campaign for high political office. What makes him unusual is that he has no interest in winning the US Senate seat he is vying for, or even in challenging the other candidates competing in the 7 June primary.
O’Dowd, a software entrepreneur with a 40-year history of working on military, aerospace and other commercial contracts, is running, rather, out of frustration at his fellow tech entrepreneur, Elon Musk, whom he accuses of endangering road safety with a driver assistance software package he’s put in his Tesla electric cars.
O’Dowd doesn’t deny that this is a strikingly narrow platform on which to run for public office. He’s aware, too, that there are risks as well as potential rewards in using a political campaign to take a swing at the world’s richest man – especially now that Musk is dominating headlines as the prospective new owner of Twitter.
But O’Dowd is also unapologetic about being a single-issue candidate. His mission, he says, is to ensure that government regulators become much tougher with the “move fast and break things” ethos that has inspired Musk and many other tech pioneers over the past two decades. He’s spent $650,000 on advertising so far and seems poised to spend a lot more over the next six weeks.
And, in his mind, it’s not just about Musk. O’Dowd believes that the problems he’s documented with Tesla’s “full self-driving” software package – problems that, according to publicly available video footage, have caused vehicles to veer unexpectedly into the wrong lane, turn the wrong way, crash into poles and endanger other road users – are emblematic of a broader and increasingly serious problem.
In a world increasingly dependent on computers to run critical machinery, O’Dowd says, it’s vital that the software is built as securely and reliably as possible, only Silicon Valley rarely sees it that way. If we can’t stop semi-autonomous cars crashing into things, he argues, how are we supposed to keep our power grids, hospitals, office computers and other vital systems safe from cyber attack and other threats?
O’Dowd has spent his career aspiring to build “software that never fails and can’t be hacked” for projects including fighter jets, nuclear bombers and a space exploration vehicle for Nasa, so the issue is deeply personal to him.
“The bigger picture,” he said, “is about software and computers in general. It’s about making computers safe for humanity.”
Political analysts have been scratching their heads over this pitch from the moment O’Dowd announced his late entry into the Senate race on 19 April. Was this really a politically motivated campaign, they asked, or just a branding exercise to drum up business for O’Dowd’s Santa Barbara-based company, Green Hills Software, and whose clients include several of Tesla’s car making rivals including General Motors, BMW and Daimler?
Was O’Dowd targeting Tesla because he really thought it was behaving worse than the dozens of other companies working to develop a self-driving car, or was he merely piggy-backing on Musk’s name recognition to attract media attention?
“It’s unusual for a campaign to be so singularly focused on a very discrete commercial issue,” said Dan Weiner, director of the elections and government program at the Brennan Center for Justice. “You could say this is the apotheosis of a system in which corporate interests have free rein to engage with the political process.”
O’Dowd insisted that his campaign had nothing to do with commercial self-interest. Rather, he said, he found Tesla’s “full self-driving” software package more alarming than anything else in…
Read More: California tech titan’s Senate run has one target: Tesla’s self-driving software | US Senate