Scott Wiener is winning the fundraising contest in the race to succeed retiring Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi. The state Senator has amassed a war chest of $5.7 million, more than twice the amount of his opponent District 1 Supervisor Connie Chan. The contribution gap has failed to produce the results Wiener wanted. The election will be a close one, according to recent polls despite the mountains that have been spent to attack Chan by mail, online and over the airwaves.

The likely reason is that much of the money pouring into the Wiener campaign comes from local tech moguls, a group increasingly reviled by their fellow San Franciscans. A poll conducted by the University of Southern California found that a mere 6% of the state’s voters have a “very favorable” opinion of the state’s major tech companies. Fully a quarter hold a “very unfavorable” opinion while a whopping 50% support a moratorium on data centers, the engine for technologies like artificial intelligence and crypto currency.

Wiener is the tech industry’s candidate. His donors are a who’s who of local tech executives and investors. Among them are billionaires like crypto chief Chris Larsen, venture capitalist Michael Moritz, Twilio founder John Wolthuis, and Yelp’s CEO Jeremy Stoppelman. Another is centimillionaire Garry Tan, who leads Y Combinator, the world’s largest incubator of technology companies, and a political gadfly who gained notoriety when he tweeted a death threat to seven members of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. Tan’s antics have done little to endear tech executives to local voters. 

All the executives listed above have donated directly to Wiener as well as to Abundant Future, a political action committee formed on Wiener’s behalf. Larsen has given $200,000 to Abundant Future; Moritz, $100,000; Wolthuis, $50,000; Stoppelman, $35,000; and Tan, $25,000. The PAC was originally created to thwart the candidacy of Saikat Chakrabarti, the political upstart who spent about $5 million of his fortune to secure Pelosi’s seat. Abundant Future PAC threw more than $800,000 to attack Chakrabarti. When he failed to secure one of the the top two spots needed to send him to the November 2026 general election, it set its sights on Chan. 

Abundant Future is one of four PACs that have been established to bankroll Wiener’s way to the nation’s capital. PACs allow deep-pocketed political donors to exceed the strict $3,500 limit on campaign contributions. The richest, by far, is Abundant Future which has spent more than $2 million to bankroll Wiener’s way to Washington, D.C. It is an extension of the Abundance Network, started by Zach Rosen and Misha Chellam, the former a tech founder and leading figure in the Yes in My Backyard movement, a coalition of tech and real estate interests, while the latter is a major figure in the national Abundance movement. Rosen, who founded California YIMBY, along with Chellam offer a simple — and false — prescription to ease California’s housing crisis. They propose that removing all barriers to development from environmental review to community control will magically produce housing at all price points.

Rosen is nothing if not ambitious: He has boasted of his ties to Wiener, describing them as having been essential to his scheme to take over the California state house. Now he has set his sights on reshaping national politics, promising to spend $250 million a year through the Abundance Network to further a project of deregulation. Abundant Future found an ally in the AI industry, which donated $3 million to Abundant Future via Public First Action, a PAC largely funded by San Francisco AI firm Anthropic. Wiener has boasted of his efforts to regulate AI although his proposal was influenced by the industry which sought a friendly member of the state Senate to author weak legislation.

Wiener has delivered for his wealthy donors. His AI legislation, which passed last year, was nothing more than a slap on the wrist for an industry that might have faced far greater sanctions from a less friendly politician. Since being elected to the state Senate in 2016, he has worked most tirelessly to pass legislation housing bills that effectively wrested planning decisions from cities and handed them to the state. California YIMBY Chief Executive Brian Hanlon is believed to have authored most of the state senator’s housing legislation. On its website, California YIMBY lists its legislative victories, the vast majority being bills sponsored by Wiener.

Now Wiener’s corporate, real estate and tech backers are paying Wiener back by generously funding his long-time dream of sitting in Congress. Their initial $1.5 million investment – the amount they contributed to his first run for state Senate – was shown to have paid off handsomely. They’ve increased it by several orders of magnitude, firm in the belief that Wiener at 56 years-old will be an invaluable long-term asset should he get to Washington.