San Francisco Is Getting Its Own Council of Tech Oligarchs

Last November, the people of San Francisco elected Daniel Lurie—one of the wealthy heirs to the Levi Strauss fortune—to be their new mayor. Now, Lurie seems to be turning to people like himself (that is, people with a lot of money) to make pivotal decisions around how to “revitalize” the heart of Silicon Valley. The San Francisco Standard reports that Lurie’s administration has quietly launched two different (and ostensibly separate) initiatives designed to allow private, well-heeled members of the city’s upper crust to have a larger influence over the city’s political system. The first of those initiatives is a new mayoral council, dubbed the Partnership for San Francisco, that includes a host of powerful and influential Silicon Valley executives. The council will apparently include the likes of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, DoorDash CEO Tony Xu, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, and others, and will be headed by three women: Katherine August-deWilde, a former president of First Republic Bank, S ... Read full article.