No San Francisco mayor has extended such a welcoming hand to the city’s corporate elite as Mayor Daniel Lurie. Public-private partnerships, in fact, have been central to his administration’s agenda since his earliest days in office. To date, Lurie has raised more than $33 million from his wealthy backers to pay for his inauguration and support governmental initiatives.

Just last week, the mayor appointed a former McKinsey & Co. consultant to the Office of Innovation. Part of Eufern Pan’s job, funded, in part,  by a grant from former New York mayor and billionaire Michael Bloomberg’s foundation, will be to raise more money from the city’s wealthiest. Her predecessor abruptly resigned after becoming embroiled in a City Hall scandal.

Lurie has woven a tangled web of governance, big money, government favors, political machinations and conservative policy. Those funding his administration’s initiatives are often the same who contribute to the campaigns of his allies and his ballot initiatives. In turn, they donate to his philanthropies, most notably Tipping Point, the nonprofit he founded to fight poverty, and the Civic Joy Fund, the booster group he created with local events impresario Manny Yekutiel, now a scandal-ridden candidate for the Board of Supervisors. Recently, the San Francisco Chronicle shed light on the mayor’s “funding machine,” one that is “reshaping” San Francisco politics.

The top eight donors are among the wealthiest in the city. They include banking executive Katherine August-deWilde; the mayor’s mother Mimi Haas; the family of Gap Inc. founders Donald and Doris Fisher; VISA chief Ryan McInerney; crypto billionaire Chris Larsen; tech investor Michael Moritz; and OpenAI chief Sam Altman. 

The heir to the billion-dollar Levi Strauss fortune has invited business leaders to “invest in San Francisco” by donating millions to take on the work of city government. The danger of this approach is obvious: It can lead to the sort of pay-to-play politics that have long plagued San Francisco’s City Hall and contribute to the corruption that Lurie promised to eradicate. This approach also removes accountability and turns decision making over to rich donors. For example, two years into the Lurie Administration, the city has handed over control of the surveillance arm of the San Francisco Police Department to billionaire crypto chief Chris Larsen and awarded a lucrative contract to OpenGov, an online permitting software company with ties to the mayor’s allies.

Lurie’s efforts  also create a government that is shaped by the priorities of the city’s elite rather than the needs of all San Franciscans. As longtime political observer Tim Redmond has noted, billionaire largesse is no substitute for the predictable funding streams created by taxes. 

A forthcoming study from The People’s Budget Coalition and The Phoenix Project examines the top donors to the Lurie Administration and what benefits they have extracted by their financial support for the mayor’s agenda. The following are the top three donors to the Lurie Administration’s initiatives:

Topping the list of Lurie Administration’s contributors is Katherine August-deWilde. August-deWilde, a former president of First Republic Bank and ex-McKinsey & Company consultant who once sat on the board of Tipping Point. She and her husband, David deWilde, have donated about $15 million toward Lurie’s initiatives, among them the Mayoral Inauguration Fund and the Downtown Development Corporation, which focuses on large infrastructure projects like the restoration of Powell Street and the renovation of the Embarcadero Plaza.

In return for her generosity, August-deWilde was appointed chief executive of Lurie’s Partnership for San Francisco, an advisory group of corporate and financial titans with a broad — and largely undefined — mission. Members include a who’s who of local business leaders including billionaires OpenAI’s Sam Altman and tech investor Michael Moritz as well as Y Combinator’s Garry Tan, a political gadfly who became notorious for issuing death threats against seven members of the Board of Supervisors. 

August-deWilde also served on the mayor’s Charter Reform Working Group. Some of the group’s work has informed the Lurie-sponsored measures on the November 2026 ballot that, if passed, will give the mayor unprecedented power. Notably, she sat on the board of OpenGov, the company behind an online permitting system that was adopted, against the recommendation of Planning Department staffers, to streamline the process for obtaining building permits. OpenGov’s software continues to create headaches for City Hall staffers and those seeking permits. The city paid nearly $6 million to OpenGov, significantly more than that of a rival — and more robust — product.

Billionaire Michael Moritz, the onetime financial backer of now-defunct political pressure group TogetherSF, and his nonprofit foundation, Crankstart, have contributed $13 million toward the Lurie Administration’s funding priorities. Moritz, a staunch opponent of wealth and business taxes, likely encouraged Lurie to oppose the failed Overpaid CEO Tax and the statewide Billionaire Tax Act on the upcoming November ballot. Moritz is a member of the Partnership for San Francisco while Crankstart Chief Executive Missy Narula sat on the Mayor’s Charter Reform Working Group.  

The mayor’s mother, Mimi Haas, the widow of Levi Strauss heir Peter Haas, has been a significant contributor to the Lurie Administration’s projects. Collectively, Hass, the mayor’s brother, Ari Lurie and Levi Strauss and Co., have contributed $3 million. Haas was a leading funder of her son’s mayoral campaign, donating $1 million to see him elected. She continues to make political contributions to Lurie candidates and ballot initiatives through the Believe in SF political action committee.

The same names appear as campaign donors and contributors toward the Lurie Administration’s initiative. San Francisco, under Mayor Daniel Lurie, has become a city shaped by the few and the extremely wealthy. Missing from Lurie’s calculus is the notion that a city should serve all of its residents, not just the privileged.