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Inside tech billionaires’ push to reshape San Francisco politics: ‘a hostile takeover’

The Guardian and Mission Local unravel ‘grey money’ network flooding the progressive city with conservative cash

A new analysis of campaign filings, non-profit records and political contributions by the Guardian and Mission Local reveals the extent of this network, which is using its financial and organizational muscle to push the famously progressive city into adopting policies that are tougher on crime and homelessness, and more favorable to business and housing construction. “There is a growing sense … that the city’s progressive political class has failed its citizens,” Moritz, the billionaire investor and a former journalist, wrote in a May 2023 feature for the Financial Times.“Online discourse about San Francisco’s ‘doom loop’, a downward economic and social spiral that becomes irreversible, feels less like hyperbole by the day. Campaign contribution filings show that major donors include Agarwal, as well as Larsen ($100,000), Tan ($25,000) and Pantheon’s Rosen, a tech investor who launched the controversial pro-market-rate development group YIMBY California.

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