Two San Francisco billionaires who were on opposite sides of a heated mayor’s race not two years ago and spent $1.5 million to defeat candidate Daniel Lurie have become the mayor’s backing buddies, and are bankrolling his agenda.
Michael Moritz, a venture capitalist and chairman of the San Francisco Standard, and Chris Larsen, CEO of cryptocurrency company Ripple, and his wife, Lyna Lam, have pledged more than any other individuals to support Mayor Lurie’s electoral priorities this year. Collectively, they have pledged over $4 million, the bulk of that going towards Lurie’s charter-reform efforts.
They’re part of nearly 100 donors who have pledged a total of $8.3 million to fund measures and candidates backed by Lurie on the ballot in San Francisco this year.
Larsen is giving to aid the city’s recovery, “not just from the pandemic, from the last 20 years, where the city has become anti-business, bureaucratic and we weren’t paying enough attention to public safety,” he said.
Lurie is his champion in that effort. “The mayor is doing a great job,” Larsen said. “He is focused on the basics.”
It was Larsen, who after the big-money failures in 2024, noted that “We as a business community, we as a pragmatic community, we screwed up.”
Moritz, for his part, declined to address his giving and simply wrote that “the mayor is the best spokesman” for Lurie’s agenda. But charter reform has been the billionaire’s white whale for some time — he told Mission Local in 2024 that his ultimately unsuccessful measure to remake the charter would be “the greatest gift anybody has given to a mayor in the recent history of San Francisco.”
In the 2024 election, Moritz strongly supported Mark Farrell (he gave $600,000) and Larsen backed London Breed (he gave $850,000). In general they have given heavily to moderate causes of the kind that Lurie is now championing.
Mission Local tracked money going to six political action committees directly affiliated with the mayor or backing his preferred candidates.
- Most of the money we tracked is going towards Lurie’s “Clean Up City Hall” PAC, which is supporting his measures to reform the city charter and increase the power of the mayor. Donors have pledged $4.4 million to that effort, according to a representative of the campaign. Most of that comes from Larsen and Moritz: Larsen and his wife put in $2 million, and Moritz pledged $2 million.
- Lurie’s allies are also financing the mayor’s efforts to save Muni with a November parcel tax: That measure has raised over $2.5 million; Larsen’s Ripple Labs, AI company Anthropic and AirBnb each contributed $500,000.
- Moritz is also opening his checkbook for one of Lurie’s allies on the board: He has given $250,000 to a GrowSF PAC supporting District 4 supervisor Alan Wong, a Lurie appointee. It’s the bulk of the PAC’s total $300,000 funding.
For Stephen Sherrill, the District 2 supervisor seeking election, three PACs have spent on his campaign — one GrowSF PAC, dedicated to his candidacy alone, another PAC affiliated with Lurie’s supporters, S.F. Believes, and one other independent committee. Neither billionaire is involved in that effort.
To Eric Jaye, a political consultant, the fact that donors like Larsen and Moritz are now contributing to Lurie’s measures is not surprising: The ideological differences between Lurie and former Mayor Breed are slight, he said.
“They’re donating, which is what they do. They’re ‘dog bites man,’” Jaye said. “Agree with them or disagree with them, they are thoughtful San Franciscans with a vision of how this city should be organized.”
David Ho, another political consultant, echoed Jaye. While the big donors may change, the moderate and business priorities have generally always gotten significant financial backing, he said.
“The agenda has always been the same,” said Ho.
Moritz, Larsen behind bulk of charter-reform funding
Lurie’s proposed charter reform package has long been a priority for moderate and big-money donors in San Francisco: Moritz spent $3.2 million — part of a $10 million effort — on 2024’s failed measure to increase executive power. In the aftermath of the campaign’s implosion, political operatives told Mission Local that a version of charter reform would be a priority for the next cycle.
That is coming in the form of Lurie’s as-yet unnamed propositions. The measures would give more authority to the city’s executive branch by shifting powers from the Board of Supervisors and city commissions to the mayor and city administrator. It would also make it more difficult for supervisors or the public to qualify measures for the ballot by raising the threshold to be more in-line with other cities in the state.
Six major donors are backing that charter reform effort so far, according to data shared by a representative from the campaign:
- Moritz has pledged $2 million to support it.
- Larsen and Larsen’s wife, Lyna Lam, have contributed $2 million.
- The remaining donors are Michael Seibel, partner at Y Combinator ($250,000), Blake Byers, a tech investor ($100,000) and the San Francisco Hotel Council ($10,000).
While Larsen did not give directly to the PAC supporting charter reform in 2024 — his priorities were on public safety, he said — he has recently donated to SPUR, the group whose research inspired the proposed charter reform measures.
“You’ve seen our charter, it’s over 500 pages, you literally have bus schedules in there. That’s no way to run a city,” he said. (The San Francisco city charter does not list bus schedules.)
Moritz and Larsen are spending big in general this cycle. Larsen has also contributed $500,000 to support the firefighters’ bond measure in June. And both Moritz and Larsen have given $625,000 and $700,000, respectively, to Prop. C, which was created by San Francisco’s Chamber of Commerce to oppose the labor-backed “Overpaid CEO” tax on the ballot for the June election.
Larsen said the CEO tax was “incredibly short-sighted.”
Lurie is opposed to both measures, and in a statement to Mission Local, said neither measure should be on the ballot.
Tech companies, unions back Lurie’s Muni measure
Also on the horizon for this November is a proposed parcel tax increase measure to fund Muni. So far, Lurie’s committee to support that tax has raised over $2.5 million.
Most of that money comes from major tech and industry donors (Ripple Labs, the company Larsen co-founded, and AI company Anthropic each contributed $500,000), but several unions have also contributed, for a total of $55,000.
Moritz funding GrowSF effort to keep Alan Wong in seat
The mayor’s backers are also funding his allies on the board: Stephen Sherrill in District 2 and Alan Wong in District 4, have both received cash injections from PACs supporting their campaigns, including hundreds of thousands from Moritz.
GrowSF, a political advocacy group, is running a PAC for each candidate. The PAC supporting Wong has raised over $300,000; Sherrill’s has raised $262,000. The lion’s share of the GrowSF PAC supporting Wong was funded by Moritz, who gave $250,000.
On top of that, SF Believes, a new iteration of the PAC that supported Lurie’s run for mayor in 2024, has raised $827,000, almost entirely from donors who work in finance. So far, the PAC has spent $193,000 to keep two of the mayor’s preferred candidates in their roles: $146,000 to support Wong and $47,000 for Sherrill.
Sherrill also has support from two other PACS — four total are backing him. One of them has raised $29,000 from a handful of contributions. Meanwhile, the other, a labor-backed committee, has not yet reported any contributions.
According to the most recent filings, Lurie has contributed $500 to Wong’s campaign, but has not personally donated to any other measures or candidates.