As San Franciscans gear up to decide whether their embattled mayor London Breed deserves another term, political observers are watching whether this fall’s election – projected to be the most expensive municipal contest in history – will bring definitive proof of the growing political power of the city’s tech elites.

Wealthy financiers, including members of the city’s traditional financial elite and the region’s upstart tech oligarchs, have in recent years spent millions in an effort to reshape the political landscape of the city, pushing moderate candidates and policies over their more progressive rivals.

That’s the case this election cycle as well, campaign finance records from the San Francisco Ethics Commission show, with millions pouring into the mayor’s race, the battle for several seats on the board of supervisors and ballot measures that would expand the power of the mayor.

The city’s moneyed interests appear to be splitting their bets on who should be next to lead the city. Some big dollar donors are sticking with the incumbent London Breed, as she’s increasingly embraced law and order strategies to address some of San Francisco’s most persistent challenges like homelessness and overdose deaths. Others are plugging for Mark Farrell, a business- and police-friendly former supervisor and interim mayor, while still others have thrown their lot in with Levi Strauss heir and philanthropist Daniel Lurie, who has devoted at least $8m of his own money to his campaign.

Lurie appears to lead narrowly in extremely tight public opinion polls, and he’s also, by far, the frontrunner in overall fundraising, with almost $9m in his coffers and $6.38m under the control of a political action committee that supports him. In addition to his own funds, he has received significant support from his mother, Miriam Haas ($1m), and Jan Koum ($500,000), the co-founder of WhatsApp. Lurie chose to forgo public matching funds in exchange for the ability to surpass limits on individual campaign donations. All the other mayoral candidates are eligible to receive up to $1.2m in public financing.

Breed trails in fundraising with $2.17m in her campaign account and $2.51m in a Pac. Farrell, who is expected to split votes in the ranked-choice race with Lurie and Breed, is in third with $1.95m in campaign contributions and $2.22m in his Pac.

Aaron Peskin, a veteran of city government and stalwart progressive who champions increased rent controls and opposes the homeless encampment sweeps, has fundraised $1.5m. Ahsha Safaí, another progressive whose stances closely mirror Peskin’s, has raised $985,000 to date.

Breed’s campaign is the greatest beneficiary of the matching funds program, tallying $1,094,430.09 in public funds. Farrell trails narrowly with $1,063,710 in public funds, with Peskin ($821,543.28) rounding out the field.

‘The grey-money network’

A large share of the donations have been channeled through a network of non-profit organizations and political action committees, many of which are controlled or financed by figures in tech, real estate and venture capital.

The biggest among them is Neighbors for a Better San Francisco, labeled by the local news site Mission Local as the “800 pound gorilla of San Francisco politics”. The group has not contributed money to mayoral candidates as an entity, but it did endorse Farrell and Lurie as their first and second choices for mayor.

The organization may be sitting out the mayoral race financially, but it has spent heavily in recent years on San Francisco politics. From 2020 through 2024, campaign finance records show Neighbors SF was responsible for more than one of every $10 spent in political campaigns in the city, doling out a total of at least $8.7m.

Keally McBride, a professor of politics at the University of San Francisco, said the “grey-money network” and the sheer breadth of tech spending in SF’s recent elections represents the industry’s maturation as a political force in California. “Tech has more money than any other industry other than oil and gas. Chevron owned the entire city of Richmond for decades, so it’s not really out of place in the Bay Area for a critical industry to end up in control of municipal politics in their backyard.”

In the current election cycle, Neighbors SF has put $950,000 towards boosting a ballot measure that would reduce the number of oversight commissions in the city and increase the mayor’s ability to fire and hire agency heads – the measure is one of the main planks of the grey-money network’s political project

Other components of the network are putting their efforts into removing members of the board of supervisors. Grow SF, a ‘moderate’ pressure group run by former tech workers, has put $72,000 towards defeating the progressive supervisor Connie Chan and $297,000 towards ousting the supervisor Dean Preston, the latter of whom was endorsed by the Democratic Socialists of America when he won office in 2019.

In the neck and neck mayor’s race, the investors’ allegiances are divided. Chris Larsen, the founder of the cryptocurrency exchange Ripple and a longtime donor to political causes, gave $600,000 to Breed’s re-election campaign. William Oberndorf, a tech investor, serial Republican party donor and charter school proponent who co-founded Neighbors SF, gave $500,000 to Farrell’s campaign and has clashed openly with Lurie over the latter’s attack against Farrell. Farrell’s campaign is heavily backed by figures from the real estate and finance sectors. Ron Conway, an investor who was essential in Ed Lee’s 2010 mayoral victory, recently gave $100,000 to a Pac opposing Peskin, the San Francisco standard reported.

Michael Moritz, the venture capitalist, founder of two prominent political groups and owner of the San Francisco Standard, has given roughly $3m to Farrell’s campaign to date. Moritz also donated $500,000 to the ballot proposition that aims to strengthen the authority of the mayor.

Amid the growing influence of this network in local politics, there are signs that state regulators are catching up. Over the summer, Neighbors SF was hit with a $54,000 penalty for failing to disclose some of the donors to the 2022 recall of then district attorney Chesa Boudin, a progressive prosecutor whose bellwether loss marked the political influence of rightwing tech money in San Francisco.