Hillary and Bill Clinton are stars of the speaking circuit. Photo / AP
In one of her last gigs on the paid lecture circuit, Hillary Clinton addressed an eBay summit aimed at promoting women in the workplace, delivering a 20-minute talk that gave her a US$315,000 payday from the company.
Less than two months later, Clinton was feted at the San Francisco Bay-area home of eBay chief executive John Donahoe and his wife, Eileen, in one of the first fundraisers for Clinton's newly announced presidential campaign.
The two events spotlight the unusually close financial ties between Clinton and a broad array of industries with issues before the Government that paid tens of millions of dollars to her and her husband, former President Bill Clinton, in the months before the launch of her presidential campaign.
Disclosure documents filed by Hillary Clinton revealed that the couple have been paid about US$25 million ($33.9 million) for delivering 104 speeches since January last year.
While Bill Clinton's lucrative speaking career since leaving the White House in 2001 has been well documented, the new disclosures give the first public accounting of Hillary Clinton's paid addresses since she stepped down as Secretary of State. And they illustrate how the Clintons have personally profited by drawing on the same network of supporters who have backed their political campaigns and philanthropic efforts - while those supporters have gained entree to a potential future president.
Silicon Valley is one place where those overlapping interests come together, says a Washington Post analysis of the Clinton disclosures.
Of the US$11.7 million Hillary Clinton has made delivering 51 speeches since the start of last year, US$3.2 million came from the technology industry. Several of the companies that paid Clinton to address their employees also have senior leaders who have been early and avid supporters of her presidential bid.
While it is common for former presidents to receive top dollar as paid speakers, Hillary Clinton is unique as a prospective candidate who received large personal payouts from corporations, trade groups and other major interests months before launching a White House bid.
In some cases, those speeches gave Clinton a chance to sound out themes of her coming campaign and even discuss policy issues that a Clinton administration might face.
Companies that paid her to speak include giants such as Xerox, Cisco Systems and Qualcomm, as well as start-ups and biotechnology and medical technology trade groups.
The blurred line between personal and political is apparent in the cases of companies that hired Clinton to speak and are led by executives who are prominent backers of her campaign.
Salesforce.com paid Clinton US$451,000 to deliver two talks last year, and its CEO, Marc Benioff, is a major donor to Ready for Hillary, a super PAC (political action committee) that laid the groundwork for her presidential bid.
Another major backer of the PAC is Irwin Jacobs, the former chairman of Qualcomm, which paid US$335,000 for Clinton to speak in late October.
A spokeswoman for Salesforce declined to comment on how Clinton came to be invited to speak.
A spokeswoman for Jacobs said he was retired from Qualcomm and did not play a role in its decisions.
The disclosures showed Clinton's earning power on the public speaking circuit as a former Secretary of State widely viewed as the Democratic presidential nominee in waiting.
In some cases, organisations that had paid Bill Clinton to speak now paid even more to lure his wife.
The Biotechnology Industry Organisation paid Bill Clinton US$175,000 in 2010. Four years later, it paid US$335,000 to hear from Hillary Clinton.
The Advanced Medical Technology Association paid Bill Clinton US$160,000 to speak in 2009 and Hillary Clinton US$265,000 to speak last year.
The warm reception for Hillary Clinton in Silicon Valley comes after she watched a young upstart named Barack Obama lock up many of the industry's top money players during their fight for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination.
Since then, the region has had explosive growth, making it an even bigger target for candidates hunting for political donors.
Republicans such as Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky and former Florida Governor Jeb Bush are making a play to win over the traditionally left-leaning enclave.
But Clinton was ahead of them, courting tech leaders as she contemplated another White House run.
One day last July, she tweeted: "In #SiliconValley today visiting @Google, @Facebook, & @Twitter. Looking forward to seeing everyone and answering some questions."
Clinton did not receive any speaking fees from those companies, which she visited as part of a tour promoting her book, Hard Choices.
But about a month later, she made US$625,000 in one day from the tech sector - first addressing a conference in San Francisco sponsored by data storage start-up Nexenta Systems, then as a surprise guest at Cisco's sales conference in Las Vegas, where she was interviewed by chief executive John Chambers.
At the Nexenta conference, Clinton addressed several hot-button policy issues in Silicon Valley that the next president will have to confront.
She spoke of the need to "rebalance" privacy and security in government surveillance, an issue viewed as both a business and philosophical matter among tech leaders.
And she expressed interest in an idea proposed by Chambers and other chief executives to allow companies to bring profits invested overseas back to the United States at a reduced tax rate.
"It doesn't do our economy any good to have this money parked somewhere else in the world," Clinton said.
The event also gave Clinton a platform from which to weigh in on an increasingly hot national issue. In her first remarks about the unrest after the shooting death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, she urged Americans not to ignore "inequities that persist in our justice system".
Nexenta's director of communications, Allison Darin, said the topic "has nothing to do with what we do".
But, she added, "it was obviously compelling news which brought a lot of attention to the event, which is exactly what we want".
The company's chief executive, Tarkan Maner is on the national finance committee of the Ready for Hillary PAC and made a US$5000 donation to the group in September, about a month after Clinton's speech.
Darin said Maner's support for Clinton had nothing to do with the company's invitation to have her speak.
Rather, she said, company officials decided Clinton would have broad appeal for the audience of 500 top executives who attended the conference.
"It really wasn't politically focused at that time," she said. "It was just good timing."
Most of Clinton's paid speeches were closed to the public and the press. But in the few that were open, Clinton appeared to be road-testing themes that would become a part of her upcoming campaign.
In April last year, at a technology conference sponsored by software branding company Marketo, she discussed the growing gap between rich and poor in the United States.
According to news reports, she proposed changes to taxation and corporate policies to address the issue.
"Inequality of the kind we are experiencing is bad for individuals, bad for society, bad for democracy," she said, according to the New York Times. " ... Around the world, this is becoming a bigger issue everywhere."
Clinton's latest financial disclosures also highlight the amount of personal support she and her husband have received from organisations and individuals who have donated to their charity, the Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation.
At least 72 organisations that have paid the Clintons for speeches since 2001 have also donated to the Clinton Foundation. Among them, Cisco has given the foundation between US$1 million and US$5 million, and eBay's charitable foundation has given more than US$50,000.
- Washington Post-Bloomberg
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