Integrity has emerged as a central theme in the contentious congressional race between Rep. Ro Khanna and challenger Ethan Agarwal in Silicon Valley.
Integrity has become the focal point of Silicon Valley’s highly competitive congressional race, where incumbent Rep. Ro Khanna faces off against his challenger, Ethan Agarwal. Agarwal has criticized Khanna for his family’s involvement in stock trading, raising questions about ethical conduct in politics.
However, scrutiny is also falling on Agarwal’s own past as a tech entrepreneur, which is marred by significant legal challenges, including millions of dollars in debts and allegations of unpaid business expenses.
According to court records, Agarwal, who previously resided in New York, admitted in 2020 to owing $2 million to Universal Music Group due to a licensing dispute related to Aaptiv, the digital fitness company he founded. Subsequent filings reveal that Agarwal failed to pay $300,000 of a settlement he had agreed to prior to selling the company in 2021. Additionally, a lawsuit was filed against Agarwal’s company by the landlord of One World Trade Center in 2023 for $2 million over unpaid rent during his tenure as CEO, although the proceedings were discontinued that same year. The outcomes of these legal matters remain unclear.
Agarwal contends that all debts have been settled. “I ran a company that was worth $300 million 10 years ago,” he told San José Spotlight. “You get sued all the time and you settle those lawsuits, and every single one of the things that you mentioned was settled.”
Despite Agarwal’s claims, representatives for both Universal Music Group and the landlord of One World Trade Center did not respond to inquiries regarding whether he had fulfilled his financial obligations.
Davina Hurt, director of the government ethics program at Santa Clara University’s Markkula Center for Applied Ethics, emphasized the importance of scrutinizing a candidate’s history. “When a documented record includes unpaid obligations, a confessed judgment, and a subsequent default on that very settlement, that’s not a single incident. That’s a pattern that persists even after legal compulsion,” she stated. “The first question voters should ask isn’t, ‘What does this candidate promise to do?’ It’s, ‘When this candidate made a promise before, did they keep it?’”
Agarwal, who relocated to Palo Alto from New York in 2020, previously entered the California gubernatorial race last year, positioning himself as a Democrat who supports capitalism. He withdrew from that race earlier this month to focus on the Congressional District 17 seat, following Khanna’s support for a controversial California billionaire tax proposal that has drawn criticism from Silicon Valley’s affluent tech community.
While Agarwal shares Democratic views on issues like gun control and reproductive rights, he opposes the billionaire tax, arguing it could drive wealthy individuals out of the state and burden the middle class. His campaign platform also includes proposals for public health care options to compete with private insurers and expanding Medicare’s ability to negotiate lower drug prices.
Agarwal, a 40-year-old political newcomer, has frequently targeted Khanna online for his extensive stock trading activities. According to California Common Cause, Khanna executed more than 4,000 trades in 2025, with a total volume of $55.7 million, ranking him third among the year’s top congressional traders.
In response to the allegations, Khanna has co-sponsored reforms aimed at regulating congressional stock trading and has authored a resolution calling for a ban on such practices. He maintains that he does not personally own or trade individual stocks, asserting that the trades in question belong to his wife, whose premarital assets are held in an independently managed trust.
Agarwal argues that his legal troubles are minor compared to the ethical concerns surrounding Khanna. “Aside from the stock trades, I would point voters to a 2022 New York Times article that shows Ro Khanna had 149 conflicts of interest between the committees he sits on,” Agarwal said. “I was not representing public citizens at the time of the Aaptiv lawsuits. And those happened eight years ago.”
If elected, Agarwal has pledged to ban stock trading by congressional leaders and their family members. Court records indicate he was married for nearly a decade before filing for divorce in 2025, but he declined to comment on the separation.
“I’ll be divesting my personal account, pushing for a ban on stock trading by members of Congress and their families, and fighting for term limits,” Agarwal stated on social media.
Khanna’s campaign has dismissed Agarwal’s attacks as “baseless personal attacks” and characterized them as hypocritical given Agarwal’s own financial history. “The lies Ethan is spreading about Ro are sad, but also deeply hypocritical given his checkered financial and personal past,” said Khanna’s spokesperson, Sarah Drory. “We should have a conversation in our district and California about real ideas and plans to improve the lives of people in the community.”
Hurt noted that while legal issues are common among entrepreneurs, they do not solely define a candidate’s character. “One or two lawsuits can be unfortunate circumstances. Three begins to look like a pattern, and patterns are exactly what voters should be paying attention to,” she said. “Does a candidate’s history of honoring or not honoring financial and legal obligations tell us something meaningful about how they would handle public trust and taxpayer resources?”
John Sims, a professor emeritus at the University of the Pacific’s McGeorge School of Law, echoed these sentiments. “We don’t know all the details of this, but if someone is repeatedly involved in disputes of this sort where they’re accused of not telling the truth or living up to their obligation and not holding up to a settlement, what does that tell me about your character?” he asked. “The other thing I wonder about is, what does it say about your motivations for running?”
This article was first published in San José Spotlight.