It was a staggering sum: Last week, crypto billionaire Chris Larsen dropped $500,000 into the campaign of District 10 candidate Theo Ellington, making it the largest ever donation in a San Francisco supervisorial race.

Larsen’s contribution was made to a political action committee which allows San Francisco’s wealthiest to evade the city’s strict campaign finance.  Direct contributions to political candidates cannot exceed $500. Days later, Ellington tried to distance himself from his wealthy benefactor. “Outside organizations make their own decisions about how they participate in elections,” he said. “They do not speak for me, or our campaign.”  

Larsen has positioned himself as a loyal ally to Mayor Daniel Lurie. He has donated extraordinary sums to support Lurie’s pet projects. Larsen gave $9 million, alone, to  the San Francisco Police Department’s Real-Time Investigation Center which gathers and searches images from online surveillance cameras. He spent another $5 million toward revitalizing a business corridor in the struggling Tenderloin neighborhood. As his donation to Ellington demonstrates, he’s also happy to support Lurie’s favored candidates.

Larsen played much the same role for Lurie’s predecessor, London Breed, even creating a legal defense fund for the former mayor who frequently found herself in trouble with the San Francisco Ethics Commission. He was the top donor, spending $350,000, for two Breed-sponsored measures on the March 2024 ballot: Proposition E, which allows the long-troubled SFPD to widely use surveillance technologies and drones, and Proposition F, which tied welfare payments to sobriety. 

Larsen and his wife Lyna Lam are on track to become the largest donors in San Francisco’s November 2026 election. At the same time, he is also likely to be among leading contributors to state races. To date, the couple has donated $2.5 million in support of Lurie’s charter initiatives, measures that would increase mayoral power, often at the expense of citizen participation. In addition, Larsen’s firm, Ripple Labs, has given $500,000 to Lurie’s committee in support of Proposition H, the proposed parcel tax for Muni. Larsen also spent a similar amount in a New York City congressional primary earlier this year where his chosen candidate, Alex Bores, lost.

What does Larsen want in return? At the very least protection from taxes. Larsen was a vocal opponent of Proposition D, widely known as the Overpaid CEO tax on the June 2026 ballot. It called for a relatively small tax increase on companies where the chief executive makes more than 100 times the yearly salary of a median employee. The money collected — estimated at between $250 and $300 million, yearly — would have compensated for a deficit in the city’s budget created by President Donald Trump’s spending cuts.

Larsen railed against the tax and the labor unions that sponsored it. Businesses have got “to fight on a par with the unions when they are proposing stupid, job-killing ideas,” he ranted. To keep his friends in the business community happy, Lurie became the face of the opposition, using his popularity with voters to bring about Prop D’s defeat. The crypto chief and his fellow tech billionaires used the fight as a dry run for its current campaign to defeat the statewide Billionaire Tax Act, another union-sponsored initiative. Proposition 40, on the November 2026 ballot, calls for California's estimated 200 billionaires to pay a one-time tax equal to 5% of their net worth. It would fund vital services like healthcare devastated by the Trump tax cuts. To defeat it, Larsen created Golden State Promise and contributed $5 million. His firm, Ripple, added an additional $5 million. A recent report from California Common Good, found that Larsen was one of the top four spenders in state and federal races in 2026, with an eye-watering $96 million in donations. 

Larsen likes to present himself as a common-sense Democratic, pointing to his support for Vice President Kamala Harris’ 2024 presidential campaign. However, not long after Larsen declared his support for Harris, Ripple created Fairshake, a PAC that has targeted pro-consumer Democrats like former California Congresswoman Katie Porter and Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown, perceived enemies of crypto. After Harris’ loss, Ripple went on to donate about $5 million to the Trump-Vance Inaugural Committee. Larsen’s political donations speak more to self-interest and less to pragmatism.