The Standard's "Mogul Midterms" overview maps how Silicon Valley wealth is flooding California's 2026 races. The Dissent's narrower point is the one that matters most to San Francisco voters heading into the June 2 primary: the money converging on this city's ballot is not a broad movement but a handful of repeat donors operating across local, state, and national theaters at once — and the structure of that spending, anchored in federal filings, shows just how concentrated it is.

By Bex Connolly, City Hall

In San Francisco's race to replace retiring Rep. Nancy Pelosi, the most consequential money isn't going to a candidate — it's going against one. Of the roughly $778,000 in third-party spending aimed at tearing down progressive Saikat Chakrabarti, the former chief of staff to Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, almost all of it — $764,000 — has come from a single tech-backed committee, the Abundant Future PAC, Mission Local reported on May 22.

Federal filings put numbers to that operation. The Abundant Future Fund's FEC report shows the committee raised $1,277,101 and spent $699,537, and registered in Sacramento on Oct. 3, 2025. Its donor roster reads like a San Francisco moderate-money guest list: Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan, Ripple cofounder Chris Larsen, Yelp cofounder Jeremy Stoppelman, venture capitalist Jeremy Liew, and SF Standard chairman Michael Moritz, per Mission Local.

The concentration is the story. In its filings, the committee's money comes overwhelmingly from a few six-figure checks rather than a broad base — a structural fact visible in the gap between a single donor writing $100,000 and the trickle of small contributions measured in the thousands. This is not crowd-funded civic energy; it is a handful of wealthy individuals pooling money to move a local race.

Those same names recur up the ballot. Other backers of state Sen. Scott Wiener — the front-runner in the same congressional primary — include Larsen, Tan, and Stoppelman, according to The Standard. And the committee attacking Chakrabarti is itself a conduit: Abundant Future took in $500,000 from Public First Action, an Anthropic-funded PAC, and $250,000 from the Smart Justice California Action Fund, Mission Local reported.

Zoom out to the state, and the through-line holds. According to The Standard, Google cofounder Sergey Brin — who moved to Nevada late last year to avoid the proposed tax — put $66 million behind Building a Better California to defeat the union-backed billionaire tax, while Larsen put $10 million behind a separate group, Golden State Promise. The tax is sponsored by SEIU-United Healthcare Workers West, and its arrival, strategists told The Standard, is what jolted previously apolitical tech figures into action.

"They were hit over the head with a proposal for a wealth tax," Sacramento Democratic strategist Steve Maviglio told The Standard. "So they responded like the alarm went off in the morning and they jumped in all the way."

At the national level, the same donor class is splitting over AI. According to The Standard, OpenAI President Greg Brockman and venture firm Andreessen Horowitz are among donors who have poured more than $75 million into Leading the Future, a PAC opposing stringent AI regulation, while Anthropic has put $20 million into the more pro-regulatory Public First Action. The Standard further reports that Public First Action has pledged at least $500,000 to Wiener's congressional bid — a figure that comes from The Standard's reporting and is not independently confirmed here, though Mission Local separately documents the same PAC routing $500,000 into the anti-Chakrabarti committee.

The candidates on the receiving end of the spending have noticed. "They're definitely scared of this proud immigrant and labor leader," Orange County candidate Ada Briceño told the Los Angeles Times of the tech-funded committees spending against her. "They want to figure out how to try to buy this district. That's just not going to happen."

What makes this San Francisco's story is the convergence: the donors writing checks to defeat a statewide wealth tax, to shape Assembly races from the South Bay to Los Angeles, and to back national AI PACs are, in many cases, the very same people deciding which progressive gets buried in the city's June 2 primary. The breadth of the money can obscure how few hands are behind it. The filings don't.