Venture capital pioneer Tom Perkins apologises for Holocaust rant

Venture capital pioneer Tom Perkins apologised for comparing today’s treatment of wealthy Americans to the persecution of Jews in Nazi Germany, though he said he stood by his message around class warfare. “I’d deeply apologise to you and anyone who has mistaken my reference to Kristallnacht as a sign of overt or latent anti-Semitism,” he said in an interview on Bloomberg Television. “This is not the case.”

Perkins, 82, was addressing a firestorm he had created with a letter to the editor in the January 25 edition of the Wall Street Journal, in which he compared resentment of the very rich in the US to a “progressive war on the American 1%”, akin to attacks on Jews in the 1930s. In the wake of the letter, the venture capital firm he co-founded, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, distanced itself from him, saying he hadn’t been involved in the firm in years.

Perkins said that he made the analogy between wealthy Americans and Jews because the rich are a minority, like the Jews who made up just 1% of the German population before the Holocaust. He said he regretted using the word Kristallnacht, a night in 1938 when Nazis coordinated attacks against Jews, in his letter.

“It was a terrible misjudgment,” he said, adding that he has written a letter of apology to the Anti-Defamation League. “I do not regret the message

at all. Any time the majority starts to demonise any minority, no matter what it is, it is wrong and dangerous.” Perkins said he was reacting to events such as the “Occupy movement”. He also said his fix for inequality is “less interference, lower taxes.” He added that what should happen is to “let the rich do what the rich do, which is get richer, but along the way they bring everyone else with them, when the system is working.”