After slashing essential services for everyday San Franciscans, Mayor Daniel Lurie is celebrating select billionaire handouts. What’s resulted is disproportionate power for billionaires to decide what gets funded and to divert funds from public agencies to private contractors.
San Francisco is home to an estimated 58 billionaires. But rather than increase their taxes to support enhanced city services, billionaires fund anti-tax campaigns, sue the City for back taxes, and then try to rebrand themselves as philanthropic saviors. This is part of a broader effort to defund the public sector, then swoop in with selective "donations" for PR and to dictate what gets funded.
After extensive citywide cuts, the Mayor celebrated a $3 million donation from billionaires Moritz and Larson for street cleaning. Rather than go to expanding the Department of Public Works to perform additional cleaning, the funds flow to private entities, selected by Larson’s “nonprofit”, in what the Mayor and billionaire-aligned PACs are celebrating as a “public-private partnership.”
Certain things are notably absent from the donations. For example, while billionaires are happy to fund surveillance and street sweeping, they haven’t contributed a penny to public transportation or reparations for the Black community.
The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative enjoyed extensive positive PR for funding a range of nonprofits serving low-income communities, but then when the political climate changed in 2025, so did their funding priorities. They pulled funding from housing nonprofits to gain favor with the Trump administration and its anti-DEI policies, revealing how billionaire giving can be conditional, revocable, and rooted in self-preservation.
Mayor Lurie is setting a dangerous precedent by showing that safety nets and community services are negotiable and that billionaires get to decide what gets funded. It’s a system that continues to shield the rich, criminalize the poor, and move power away from working-class communities and into the hands of tech oligarchs.
