Inside the Far Left Billionaires' Push to Maintain Control of San Francisco

A string of new reporting suggests that big money only flows to moderates in San Francisco. A closer look exposes the deep pockets of the far left.

The far left partisans who dominate San Francisco politics may be throwing stones in a glass house.

Over the last week, as early voting began for the March 5th primary, with hot button issues on the ballot, the New Republic, the Guardian, and Mission Local published nearly identical follow-the-money-style news articles depicting a right-wing power grab. The reporting tracks, in the words of one of the reporters, the "network of interlocking non-profits, dark money groups and political action committees” pushing to "undo" San Francisco's "progressive policies."

Supervisor Dean Preston, who has used his perch on the city council to push for abolishing prisons and police, seized upon the news to claim that it confirms a “right wing takeover” of San Francisco. Preston, who is facing reelection, promised to “fight back” against “dystopian conservatives.”

Yet the groups and individuals named as conservative donors, like Michael Moritz and Garry Tan, are virtually all Democratic moderates with a history of donating to liberal causes. The issues these donors have zeroed in on are traditionally associated with political moderates, like restoring algebra to public middle school – the classes were removed by city leftists for racial equity reasons – hiring more police officers in the midst of a crime wave and street addiction crisis, and encouraging new construction to bring down the price of housing.

What’s more, beyond the absurdity of painting these mainstream goals as some type of fascist plot, the subtext of the trio of news articles is the false assumption that big money only flows to the moderates. In reality, the city’s hard left wildly benefits from millions of dollars from its own faction of wealthy donors – many of whom are slum lords and heirs of family wealth who have radically transformed San Francisco with years of advocacy and electioneering.

The Guardian, New Republic, and Mission Local dug into campaign finance records to show the influence of the moderates and centrist liberals in San Francisco. What about the far left? While reporters are eager to vilify the donors behind the campaign to bring back algebra for all students, the same questions are not being asked about the far left donors pushing for DEI-style government programs that make benefits contingent on skin color or race and to slash the number of police officers who can respond to incidents of violent crime. 

Take the Center for Empowered Politics. Since 2009, CEP has operated a web of advocacy and campaign groups in San Francisco and Oakland to mobilize voters for far left causes. 

The New Republic makes much of Garry Tan contributing $100,000 to the effort to oust "decarceral" San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin. But San Francisco Rising, a project of the CEP, was the largest donor to Boudin’s 2019 campaign for the DA’s office. The group formed a special independent expenditure committee and poured $288,825, more than any moderate or tech-backed group active in the election, to help carry Boudin into office.

SF Rising, which coordinates volunteer training and voter outreach among Chinese, Filipino, Black and Latin American community groups, was similarly active in recent city council races. It played a key role in working to elect Supervisors Preston, Gordon Mar, Connie Chan, Shamann Walton, and other members that make up the far left flank of San Francisco politics in recent years. Eight of SF Rising’s affiliate community groups, which are already pushing to influence the March 8th vote, are listed at the end of its annual report.

In 2022, SF Rising organized an effort to overturn the city’s redistricting maps, which they perceived as unfriendly to allied progressive leaders. The group flooded the hearing room to demand the removal of the nonpartisan task force and the use of a different, gerrymandered map that would have benefited candidates like Preston.

SF Rising/CEP receives financial support from a small clique of wealthy liberal interests:

– The James Irvine Foundation, funded by the inherited fortunes of the Irvine Company, the real estate interest that planned and built much of the early development in Orange County, has donated $600,000 to SF Rising/CEP and over $4.5 million to the Chinese Progressive Association, SF Rising’s Chinese outreach affiliate, over the last six years. 

– SF Rising's "Youth and Families Taking Power" PAC was funded largely by middle-aged wealthy donors. Kaitlyn and Michel Krieger, the couple that co-founded Instagram, gave $42,500; billionaire Susan Pritzker gave $15,000; and Elizabeth Simons, the daughter of a billionaire hedge fund trader, gave $25,000. Simons’ charitable foundation has additionally donated at least $160,000 to CEP over the last three years.

– The Open Society Policy Center, funded by billionaire George Soros, has donated multiple grants to SF Rising/CEP totaling $1,350,000 since 2020, according to tax returns.

– Other major donors to SF Rising/CEP include Google co-founder Sergey Brin, who gave $100,000 through his foundation, and the Zellerbach family, the heirs of a timber and paper fortune now owned by Koch Industries, who have given $50,000. The Evelyn and Walter Haas, Jr. Fund of the billionaire Levi Strauss family fortune has donated $594,000 to SF Rising/CEP.

The Guardian, Mission Local and New Republic reporting took great pains to depict moderate political efforts in San Francisco as nefariously shrouded in a mix of varying political entities, some disclosed and some not, using 501(c)(3) and 501(c)(4) nonprofit groups and political campaign committees. The Guardian referred to these entities as “dark money groups.”

But that is exactly how SF Rising/CEP describes its own network. Alex Tom, the former executive director of CEP and co-founder of San Francisco Rising, gave a 2021 presentation on his organization's networked strategy for building political power. Speaking alongside Cat Brooks, the leader of the Anti-Police Terror Project, a billionaire-funded group that works to defund and abolish police departments in the Bay Area; Alicia Garza, one of the co-founders of Black Lives Matter Foundation; and activist Dulce Garcia; Tom said the following about his “ecosystem” approach (emphasis added):

ALEX TOM: We built a strong team. Right now we're doing the organizing, investing in leadership development and organizing in our communities. And in that time, we just created form that followed our function, right? We were winning shit, right. Losing, too, right. But we were still right around Lennar. Anyways, moving on. But we formed (C)(3)s, (C)(4)s, PACs and an LLC ecosystem, right. And when we were thinking about the national election last year, we were like, what can the Bay do to not do what we usually do.

Audit reports filed with the California government show that CEP outsources much of its work not only to a variety of 501(c)(3) and 501(c)(4) organizations but also through several LLCs, including a firm called Resilient Strategies and another called Core Commons LLC. CEP oversees and coordinates action among dozens of social justice nonprofits and community organizations throughout the Bay Area. Most do not disclose donors.

In other words, both the far left and moderate factions at war with one another in San Francisco use the same type of political vehicles. Only the latter receives scrutiny in the mainstream press.

The other claim made by the journalists is the suggestion that real estate interests are solidly in the moderate camp. The Mission Local and Guardian piece noted the involvement of Kilroy Realty and real estate investor Brandon Shorenstein as examples. That much is true, but it elides the fact that many other incumbent real estate interests have financed far left campaigns and media entities for years.

Tenants and Owners Development Corporation is one such example. The housing nonprofit owns and operates single-room occupancy (SRO) buildings throughout downtown San Francisco. TODCO, as it is known, is one of the biggest campaign donors that uses its political muscle to aggressively lobby against new housing construction. The network of buildings -- which are infamous for poor maintenance, pest infestations, and rampant drug abuse and overdose deaths at its facilities -- benefits from a lack of housing stock. Fewer units fuel higher housing costs, translating into millions of dollars of fees that TODCO can generate through refinancing schemes and by charging the U.S. and San Francisco governments, which pay fair-market rates for TODCO’s over 900 tenants.

John Elberling, the founder of TODCO, used a subsidiary of the firm to spend $435,070 during the 2022 general election in San Francisco, making him the largest individual donor via his corporate donations.

TODCO maintains close ties to the far left faction, which is led in part by former San Francisco Supervisor Jane Kim, who now leads the Working Families Party California affiliate. Last week in Politico, Kim accused the centrist group TogetherSF of being a conduit for corporate money. However, records show that in 2022, TODCO paid Kim $122,760 as a consultant. TODCO has also donated at least $30,000 to the nonprofit that publishes 48Hills.org, a progressive news site that champions the far left faction in the city, and $10,000 to the Democratic Socialists of America.

The Guardian, which is heavily funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, points a finger at investor Michael Moritz funding the San Francisco Standard. But alongside TODCO, Clint Reilly, a local real estate mogul who now owns the San Francisco Examiner and SF Weekly, has also donated to 48Hills.org. Gil Duran, before writing his piece for the New Republic denouncing "reactionary" tech money in the city, worked for the Reilly-owned Examiner. Reilly, however, appears to be offloading parts of his empire. He recently sold a Sea Cliff home for $14.5 million and a building in Jackson Square for $60 million.

The Akonadi Foundation is another example. I recently wrote about the group and its former president, Lateefah Simon, who is now cruising to victory in an East Bay congressional race. The foundation is funded by Wayne Jordan, a real estate investor who owns properties throughout San Francisco. Jordan’s group has used his largesse to finance the activists actively pressuring lawmakers to cut police budgets and remove police officers from low-income neighborhoods.

Jordan’s wife Quinn Delaney is part of a small group of liberal mega-donors responsible for driving changes in California’s criminal justice system, with a focus on reducing criminal penalties and enacting restrictions on police activity. The group, including Kaitlyn Krieger, Elizabeth Simons, and Patty Quillin, the wife of billionaire Netflix founder Reed Hastings, is already lavishing support for 2024 races. Recent disclosures show that they are funneling money to local elections in San Francisco for judges accused of providing early releases to violent offenders. 

Notably, many of these wealthy donors do not live in the cities they are remaking. The major donors to SF Rising and the city’s far left PACs tend to live in Santa Cruz, Atherton, Palo Alto and New York -- far from the daily violence in the Tenderloin and SOMA. Moritz and Tan, by contrast, live in San Francisco, as does David Sacks, another donor singled out by the Guardian and The New Republic.

It is particularly rich for Preston to call attention to supposed dark money groups seeking influence in San Francisco. As I've previously reported, Preston is the heir to a trust fund fortune, which he has used to finance activist groups throughout the Bay Area. Many of the Preston trust fund-funded groups, like the Anti-Police Terror Project and Critical Resistance – neither of which discloses donors – end up protesting in San Francisco to support his agenda.

Photo: AscentXmedia / Getty