Billionaire Influence Deepens Divisions Among San Francisco Democrats

Silicon Valley billionaires poured millions of dollars into San Francisco elections in November to increase policing, consolidate mayoral power and shift the city to the center politically.

The bets paid off — for some.

Mayor Daniel Lurie tapped OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, cryptocurrency CEO Chris Larsen and other business leaders to help lure major companies and their employees back to San Francisco.

The move is a boon for private sector leaders, who now have a direct line to City Hall, and comes as San Francisco’s economy struggles to rebound from the pandemic.

However, several billionaires shaping San Francisco are also working with President Donald Trump. The money flowing into local politics has deepened fractures among San Francisco Democratic leaders, mirroring the national Democratic Party’s struggle to unite behind a single strategy.

“San Francisco should be leading the resistance and opposition to Donald Trump, but we’re seeing how big money in San Francisco has kind of neutered the city. It has neutralized us on issues,” said Peter Gallotta, a member of San Francisco’s Democratic County Central Committee. “We’re struggling now with an identity crisis of ‘who are we?’”

The identity crisis was palpable shortly after Trump’s inauguration when Gallotta proposed a resolution condemning tech titans who supported Democrats in San Francisco while cozying up to Republicans in Washington.

Gallotta, a DCCC member since 2017, sought to spotlight figures like Larsen, who contributed more than $1 million to moderate Democratic candidates in San Francisco’s November election, campaign finance records show. Ripple, the cryptocurrency company Larsen co-founded and chairs, donated $5 million to Trump’s inauguration fund.

WhatsApp CEO Jan Koum donated $250,000 to a PAC supporting Lurie for mayor and $5.1 million to Trump’s campaign. Venture capitalist William Oberndorf, co-founder of Neighbors for a Better San Francisco, a moderate organizing group, spent over $1 million on San Francisco elections in 2024, primarily backing mayoral candidate Mark Farrell. Oberndorf also contributed $100,000 to Mitch McConnell’s Senate Leadership Fund, according to Federal Election Commission data.

Altman, who contributed $1 million to Trump’s inauguration, was a key advisor on Lurie’s City Hall transition team.

“Democrats really need to point to how this money is already influencing the policies of the Trump administration, and also just how big money continues to influence our political system here in California and in San Francisco,” Gallotta, one of the remaining progressives on the DCCC after moderates took over the majority in 2024, told KQED.

Gallotta’s resolution passed, but several members pushed back against language that called out leaders in tech, one of the city’s biggest industries for tax revenue. Nancy Tung, chair of the DCCC, voted against the resolution.

“If it was an indictment on the amount of money that gets spent in our political elections in San Francisco, then it was really one-sided,” Tung told KQED, pointing to money spent by organized labor on local races.

Silicon Valley’s spending power often outweighs that of organized labor, said Jane Kim, a member of the DCCC and director of the California Working Families Party.

“Billionaire wealth will vastly outpower labor’s ability to give,” she said. “What we see is an unfortunate imbalance of who gets influence in government today.”

Others wanted to dilute Galotta’s resolution to rebuke Trump rather than his donors who are influencing San Francisco.

“What we need to perpetuate is a united voice opposing Donald Trump, not having the same old tired fights,” DCCC member Trevor Chandler said during January’s meeting.

The DCCC later voted to create a separate resolution based on Chandler’s proposal to denounce Trump’s agenda targeting the city’s sanctuary status, transgender rights and other issues. It passed in February after additional infighting.

“The resistance against Trump this time around is really going to be in the courts again,” Tung said. “I understand that people are very frustrated, and they want to be demonstrating in the streets, but it’s exhausting to do that.”

Democrats in Washington are struggling to find a strategy for countering Trump. Their disagreements came to a head this month when Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer was one of 10 Democrats to vote for a Republican spending bill aimed at delaying a government shutdown.

“I myself don’t give away anything for nothing,” Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi told reporters in a dig at Schumer after the bill passed.

As representatives in Washington splinter over government funding, San Francisco faces its own nearly $1 billion budget deficit. Kim, a former San Francisco supervisor, compared agitation among San Francisco Democrats to intraparty fights at the national level.

“We see a lot of the same advisors and donors for both Lurie’s administration and the Trump administration, and the fact that he hasn’t spoken for that is disappointing,” Kim said. “Clearly, they’re very different in terms of the goals that they have.

“But they have a similar approach to government — that you don’t need any government experience in order to lead and that hiring the wealthiest people with private sector experience is going to fix the government.”

Lurie, who had no prior elected experience before becoming mayor, broke the city’s record for the most expensive mayoral campaign in history, the majority coming from his own wealth as an heir of the Levi Strauss fortune.

Since taking office, Lurie has boosted the city as an artificial intelligence hub. Accompanied by a live pianist, Lurie recently promised tech workers at the new Mission Bay headquarters of OpenAI, the artificial intelligence company and maker of ChatGPT, that San Francisco’s reputation as the tech capital of the world would soon rise again.

“OpenAI is leading our city’s latest tech resurgence,” he said. “My administration will ensure that our city is a place where companies can succeed and a place where your employees are proud to live.”

Lurie has remained quiet on Trump and his relationship with Altman, Elon Musk, David Sachs and other Silicon Valley billionaires. Instead, City Attorney David Chiu and city supervisors have led resistance to Trump’s attacks on LGBTQ rights, immigrants and public funding as Bay Area residents increasingly demand Democratic representatives in Washington press harder against executive orders from the White House.

“Daniel Lurie is the poster child of our politics becoming an oligarchy. But he didn’t pass Citizens United — he exploited it. And we need to give him a chance,” said political consultant Eric Jaye, referring to the 2010 Supreme Court ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, which allowed wealthy people and corporations to spend unlimited money on elections. “This country has been sliding away from a vigorous democracy. You can buy elections now.”

Without campaign finance reform, private interests will continue to wield and consolidate power locally and nationally, Jaye said.

“The richest people in the world want to control the San Francisco government, and they are spending virtually unlimited amounts of money in an attempt to do so,” he added.