Michael Bloomberg Gives $1 Million to Back Mayor London Breed’s Reelection

Updated 5 p.m. Wednesday

Former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg has dropped $1 million to back Mayor London Breed’s bid for reelection, according to campaign finance filings.

Breed had endorsed the billionaire businessman’s self-funded 2020 presidential campaign — the most expensive in U.S. history — after then-Sen. Kamala Harris dropped out of the race. His donation beefs up Breed’s independent expenditure committee, Supporting London Breed for Mayor 2024, in an increasingly expensive race in San Francisco.

Nonprofit founder and Levi Strauss heir Daniel Lurie has raked in over $9 million between different fundraising committees and self-funded contributions, and former supervisor and mayor Mark Farrell has raised more than $1 million as well.

Farrell has also come under scrutiny for ties to a ballot measure fundraising committee backed by the moderate political organizing group Together SF, which has raised more than $1.4 million from tech leaders and conservative billionaires like William Oberndorf and Thomas Coates.

Campaign finance disclosures released this week also showed Eric Mathewson, a tech founder, gave $50,000 to Farrell’s committee supporting the TogetherSF ballot measure, which would slash the number of city commissions from 130 to a maximum of 65.

Billionaire venture capitalist Michael Moritz also donated a whopping $1.5 million to a committee supporting the TogetherSF commission reform measure, recent filings show.

Doordash CEO Tony Xu dropped $100,000 in August to keep Breed in office also, campaign finance filings show.

Supervisors Aaron Peskin and Ahsha Safaí, who are both running for mayor, have raised $464,000 and $488,000 in direct contributions, respectively.

Peskin has raised $665,000 in public financing, while Safaí has brought in $488,000 through the city’s program that allows eligible mayoral candidates to raise up to $1,200,000 in public funds for campaigns.

Bloomberg is a Democratic megadonor who won the election in New York as a Republican before becoming independent and eventually rejoining the Democratic Party in 2018. In December, he donated $200,000 to Breed’s independent expenditure committee, which allows candidates to receive donations larger than the $500 limit on candidate-controlled fundraising committees.

Campaigns are not allowed to communicate with their independent committees, and Breed’s campaign declined requests for comment about the donation.