bay area

There is no doubt which candidate California’s billionaires want to be the next governor of California: San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan. 

A Chronicle analysis found more than 30 billionaires — the vast majority of whom live in California — have donated to one of the top gubernatorial candidates or to an independent committee supporting them, totaling about $9 million. More than two-thirds (25) donated to support Mahan, one of eight Democrats in the race. The billionaires’ financial support to Mahan, which totaled at least $8.6 million as of Wednesday, could help boost his profile in a crowded June primary. Former Fox News commentator Steve Hilton, a Republican, had the second-most billionaire support, at seven donors.

Other 10-figures-plus individuals who gave money to back Mahan include Bay Area real estate developer John Sobrato and San Francisco venture capitalist Michael Moritz, co-founder of the San Francisco Standard. Like most of the dozens of billionaire donors the Chronicle identified, both donated to Mahan’s personal campaign. State law caps contributions to candidate-controlled committees at $39,200 for both the primary and general election contests, meaning contributors can give $78,400 total per election cycle.

The currently available donation data is incomplete. Candidates must immediately report all contributions they receive over $5,000 — but the state hasn’t yet made detailed data available for contributions made in 2026, and Mahan only entered the race earlier this year. And committees don’t have to report smaller donations until mid-April.  

The available data also indicates that fundraising for Mahan has surged since he declared his candidacy in late January. Supporters have given a total of at least $24 million to back his bid, a sum that exceeds the reported totals of any of his competitors except billionaire activist Tom Steyer, who has almost entirely self-funded his campaign.

Moritz has given the most to back Mahan, donating more than $2 million.

Sergey Brin, the co-founder of Google’s parent company Alphabet, is one of three billionaires, along with Chris Larsen and Joe Lonsdale, who have donated to two candidates. All three gave to Mahan and Hilton. 

The support isn’t helping Mahan yet: Only 4% of likely voters support him, according to a Berkeley IGS Poll released Wednesday. That puts him in a tie for seventh with former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and just ahead of former state Controller Betty Yee and Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond — none of whom have any reported billionaire support. The survey found that 16% of the respondents remain undecided. The top two candidates in the June 2 primary, regardless of party affiliation, advance to the general election in November. 

Mahan has become the favorite of the billionaire class in part because of what he’s promised for them: He has vociferously opposed a proposed statewide ballot measure that would administer a one-time wealth tax on billionaires. Mahan has also advocated for criminal penalties for low-level offenses and homelessness — positions that are apparently attractive to deep-pocketed tech donors.

“Folks in Silicon Valley have been clamoring for him to run,” Silicon Valley fundraiser and Democratic strategist Cooper Teboe, who is not affiliated with the campaign, said before Mahan entered the race. “I’ve been getting calls asking if I could help push him to run for months.”

The concern about a candidate being supported by billionaires is that “many of these, especially the tech billionaires, have made their money from extracting profit from working-class people, both as their customers as well as their workers,” said Ludovic Blain, CEO of the California Donor Table, which focuses on electing progressive candidates, particularly people of color. “And now these billionaires are investing political money in order to keep their taxes low and to make government work even more for them, at the expense of all the rest of us.”

Blain organization has endorsed Steyer, who is himself a billionaire. In 2013, Steyer walked away from the Farallon Capital fund that he ran for 26 years. The portfolio that made him wealthy included investments in the coal, oil and gas sectors and private prisons. Steyer told the Verge in 2019: “Look, when I was running our investment firm, we invested in every part of the economy. Over a decade ago, I realized that the energy that was fueling the economy in America and around the world had this huge unintended consequence of climate change. So I did divest.”

Blain said Steyer has “gone all the way from investing in prisons and other things to being endorsed by progressive criminal justice groups because he’s good on criminal justice. He has really changed his trajectory of investing and spending in ways that these donors have not yet.” 

Steyer was also just endorsed by the criminal justice advocacy organization Smart Justice, which opaquely referred to Mahan in its announcement. 

‘We have many friends in the field, but we know this election is fraught with possible missteps that could land us with either a top two Republican run off or a governor who is one of the most conservative Democrats we have seen in a long time and bought by Big Tech,” the group said in a statement. 

The 2.3 million-member California Labor Federation also referenced billionaires’ involvement in the race when it announced a joint endorsement this week of four Democrats: Steyer, Rep., Eric Swalwell, Villaraigosa and former Rep. Katie Porter.

“All earned such significant support from our unions, the only way to get to two-thirds required was to endorse all four,” said Labor President Lorena Gonzalez. “This also allows us to communicate to our members about the anti-union candidates in this race. At the end of the day, our enemy is the Big Tech billionaires.”

Earlier this week, during an appearance on “The Daily Show,” host Jon Stewart asked Mahan about his support from tech titans, in light of how AI advances could lead to more job losses and poverty. 

“Why are they supporting you?” Stewart asked. “Why should we trust their money and why should we trust their industry?”

“I think it would be a mistake to try to regulate the industry to the point where it’s just created somewhere else,” Mahan said. “We need to shape it. We need to regulate in a way that makes it work for people.” 

Several of the billionaire donors to Mahan are tied to billionaire conservative donor and Donald Trump supporter Peter Thiel, who co-founded the data company Palantir. Among those donors is Lonsdale, whose venture firm, Lonsdale Enterprises Inc., contributed to a Trump-supporting America PAC started by Elon Musk. Other billionaire Mahan donors include Los Angeles developer and former mayoral candidate Rick Caruso, Snapchat co-founder Evan Spiegel, Coinbase cryptocurrency co-founder Brian Armstrong, Sun Microsystems co-founder Vinod Khosla, San Francisco investor Bill Oberndorf, a longtime former Republican who was a top donor to the recall campaign of former San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin as well as to the 2021 gubernatorial campaign of Republican former San Diego Mayor Kevin Faulconer.