Progressives Challenge San Francisco Mayor’s Embrace Of Ceos

SAN FRANCISCO — Riding a city comeback narrative and a wave of popularity, San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie is facing a test over one of his signature strategies: leveraging his close ties to wealthy tech and business leaders to revive his hometown.

The Levi Strauss heir ousted the incumbent mayor last year amid voter discontent with public safety, homelessness and a beleaguered downtown. His win spearheaded a resurgence of moderate Democrats in a city famously controlled by progressives who have long had a complex relationship with the billionaires in their midst.

Since then, Lurie has repeated the mantra that San Francisco is “open for business,” setting up an exclusive group of CEO powerbrokers to shape the city’s recovery, welcoming the expansion of major AI companies like OpenAI, shepherding autonomous Waymo vehicles onto the city’s main commercial artery and brokering a deal for the robotaxis to eventually offer driverless rides to the city’s airport.

“As mayor, my commitment is to create the conditions so companies and workers want to be here,” he said during OpenAI’s office expansion earlier this year.

Already, Lurie has notched public relations wins with a range of different polls showing widespread support for the mayor’s public safety and pro-business approach to restoring his city and its reputation. Lurie’s tech and business-friendly policies as well as personal connections have helped him secure $50 million for downtown revitalization and $1 million for police recruiting, both of which were funded by industry figures.

Lurie is trying to leverage the public good will and support from corporate leaders to grapple with some of the city’s daunting challenges, including an ailing transit system that faces a looming $300 million-plus funding shortfall. The initiative would ride along with a bill signed by Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom this year that allows for a regional tax measure on the ballot to help San Francisco’s transit system, among others.

But the city’s progressives are far from thrilled about tech-friendly tactics, or ready to relinquish their claim as the city’s rightful leaders. In a challenge to Lurie’s olive branch to business, city Supervisor Connie Chan is throwing her weight behind a separate labor-backed ballot initiative that would levy higher taxes on highly-paid executives as their employees and robocars repopulate the city’s post-pandemic offices and streets.

“Trump’s billionaire tax giveaways are hurting working people. Billionaires are becoming Trillionaires. So we’re going to ask the same folks who reaped a windfall from the Trump tax cuts to pay their fair share,” Chan told POLITICO exclusively in a statement announcing her stance this week.

Chan is running for Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi’s Congressional seat next year, and her support for the labor effort, which still needs to collect enough signatures to qualify for the June ballot, could help punctuate her liberal bona fides going into what is expected to be a competitive contest.

Chan proposed her own, similar ballot measure in October that would have taxed ride-hailing companies in addition to executives, in part as a reaction to tech billionaires’ influence in the city. Software mogul Marc Benioff — whose Salesforce Tower is the tallest in the city and whose company is San Francisco’s top private employer — played a key role in first encouraging, then dissuading President Donald Trump from sending the National Guard to San Francisco.

Chan on Monday dropped her effort to support the one backed by labor.

“What was really the last straw for my colleagues and I was you saw billionaires like Marc Benioff making these throwaway comments without having to pay any price,” Chan told POLITICO when first introducing her measure.

Lurie himself travels in the same circles as the city’s wealthy elite. The mayor personally picked up the phone and urged Benioff, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and other tech executives to call Trump and ask him to stand down the National Guard before speaking to the president himself.

Those personal connections have also manifested in Lurie’s administration. Former Twitter chief financial officer Ned Segal is the city’s chief of housing and economic development, and Altman was named to Lurie’s transition team earlier this year.

With Lurie and labor’s different plans coming into focus, which measure succeeds, and which fails, could be read as a signal of broader voter sentiment toward the new mayor, his relationship with billionaire business leaders and if the city’s swing to the center is here to stay.

“The stakes are high for both sides and will determine if San Francisco will continue its liberal/moderate political shift or if the city will turn back to the progressive left,” said longtime city political consultant Sam Singer, who’s advised tech giants like Facebook and Airbnb.

The political jockeying unfolding around the ballot initiatives is complex and evolving.

In her bid for Congress, Chan will need to distinguish herself in a field that includes at least two others — prominent state Sen. Scott Wiener and Saikat Chakrabarti, a wealthy former tech executive who previously worked as chief of staff to Rep. Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez. If Chan jumps further into the ballot measure battle, it could go a long way toward increasing her visibility with voters.

With the wealth tax effort, progressives in City Hall and some of the city’s politically powerful labor unions see an opportunity to slap back against the influence of the city’s major business interests.

“Big greedy corporations and their billionaire owners are making San Francisco unaffordable,” said Teamsters union California co-chair Peter Finn in a statement to POLITICO. His union is among the labor groups pushing to tax highly-paid executives. “It’s about time they pay their fair share to ensure everyday San Franciscans can afford to live here,” Finn added.

Notably, the Teamsters-backed initiative would not include a ride-hailing tax — like Chan’s plan proposed — despite theunions’ long-simmering battle with autonomous vehicles, particularly Waymos, due to concerns about job loss.

Chan’s initial plan had drawn fire from Garry Tan, the vocal, centimillionaire CEO of startup accelerator Y Combinator, who has helped fuel the city’s move to the political center through his donations.

Tan said that Chan was “anti-business and doesn’t want anyone to start startups in SF,” recently on X before she withdrew her tax initiative.

While moderates had trashed Chan’s plan, progressives have not done the same when it comes to Lurie’s proposal, which is still being refined.

Progressive Supervisor Jackie Fielder, who had signed onto Chan’s initiative, told POLITICO before Chan pulled it that she would consider backing Lurie’s real estate tax plan, but that it did not go far enough.

“The measure should not allow landlords to pass the cost of the tax down to rent controlled tenants, office buildings that plan to increase demand for transit should pay a higher rate under the tax, and there should be no cap on the largest property owners,” the supervisor said in a statement. Fielder also said she supported “labor’s plan to tax overpaid CEOs.”

The labor-backed proposal would send revenue to the city’s general fund, while Lurie’s measure would directly fund transit and appear on the November ballot.

For his part, Lurie seems unlikely to get behind labor’s proposal. While it is not necessarily in conflict with his own, it could anger pro-business moderates and make it harder for Lurie to make his city-on-the-rise pitch to deep-pocketed tech and AI companies. His office declined to comment for this story.

For a mayor with his own plan to fund transit as he recruits businesses back to the city, it might be a stretch for him to support levies on the kinds of highly-paid executives who just helped him ward off the Trump administration’s militarization of his home city floated by Benioff.

Current Board of Supervisors President Rafael Mandelman said that adding additional taxes on the wealthy or companies “probably would make it harder for the mayor to make the case to business here and in other places that San Francisco has turned over a new leaf,” speaking before Chan retracted her measure.

Longtime progressive champion and former Board of Supervisors President Aaron Peskin, who ran against Lurie in the last mayoral election, argued that a wealth tax or levy on certain companies like Chan had proposed would be more popular than Lurie’s real estate tax, which would be felt by property owners and potentially passed on to renters or business tenants as well.

“A lot of these CEOs and companies like Waymo are laughing all the way to the bank,” Peskin told POLITICO. “They’re making money off of San Francisco’s streets as public transit is facing a fiscal cliff.”