San Francisco Is Getting Its Personal Council of Tech Oligarchs

Final November, the individuals of San Francisco elected Daniel Lurie—one of many rich heirs to the Levi Strauss fortune—to be their new mayor. Now, Lurie appears to be turning to individuals like himself (that’s, individuals with some huge cash) to make pivotal choices round the right way to “revitalize” the guts of Silicon Valley.

The San Francisco Normal reports that Lurie’s administration has quietly launched two completely different (and ostensibly separate) initiatives designed to permit personal, well-heeled members of the town’s higher crust to have a bigger affect over the town’s political system. The primary of these initiatives is a brand new mayoral council, dubbed the Partnership for San Francisco, that features a host of highly effective and influential Silicon Valley executives. The council will apparently embrace the likes of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, DoorDash CEO Tony Xu, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, and others, and can be headed by three ladies: Katherine August-deWilde, a former president of First Republic Financial institution, Steve Jobs’s widow and proprietor of The Atlantic, Laurene Powell Jobs, and Ruth Porat, the president and chief funding officer of Alphabet, Google’s mother or father firm.

The council is designed to “current the mayor with CEO-level views on coverage,” the Normal writes, noting additionally that it will likely be privately funded via dues paid by collaborating corporations.

On the identical time, Lurie’s workplace is launching a public-private partnership designed to infuse the town’s enterprise growth efforts with personal capital. The San Francisco Downtown Improvement Corp, which can use a mix of private and non-private cash to fund varied revitalization efforts within the metropolis’s enterprise district, will contain each public taxpayer cash and cash from personal donors. The mayoral initiatives have been beforehand unknown to the general public.

Whereas it’s not completely clear what the council can be doing, it’s value noting that the brand new group is predicated on an analogous one (the Partnership for New York City) that was based in New York within the Seventies, when the town was having its personal budgetary and governance disaster. That group equally invited rich industrialists to chart a brighter future for a beleaguered metropolis, and culled consideration and energy away from the town’s public sector in favor of personal ventures. On the identical time, San Francisco’s new group can’t assist however bring to mind the transformation presently happening on the federal stage, the place public agencies are being gutted and federal income stifled in favor of a extra personal, corporately-run strategy to governance.

The Normal notes that:

The 2 new teams have been working underneath the duvet of secrecy for weeks. Each have been coordinating intently with the mayor’s workplace, though every goals to function independently of Metropolis Corridor — and of one another. The Lurie Administration hopes to determine each as everlasting civic establishments that may proceed their work after the mayor leaves workplace, a lot because the New York teams they’re modeled on do as we speak.

Gizmodo reached out to the San Francisco Mayor’s workplace for remark.

The Downtown Improvement Corp, Lurie’s new public-private partnership, is to be helmed by David Stiepelman, a former Goldman Sachs official, who’s presently on the lookout for funding sources for it. The Normal writes that Stiepelman has been engaged with “a number of metropolis monetary and philanthropic gamers with a watch to assembling a board for the brand new group.”