TL; DR
Silicon Valley spent more than $25 million to support San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan for California governor with donors including Sergey Brin, Reed Hastings and Steve Huffman, but he polled 4 percent less than four weeks into the June 2 primary. The campaign is part of a broader push by the tech industry to reshape California politics, including opposing a proposed $500 million endowment and billionaire wealth tax ballot measure.
Silicon Valley spent more than $25 million to become California’s next governor. A candidate receives four percent of the vote. The June 2 primary less than four weeks to go. That’s the most telling thing about the campaign of San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan, 43, who entered the race in January with the backing of Google co-founder Sergey Brin, Netflix co-founder Reed Hastings, Reddit CEO Steve Huffman and hundreds of billions of dollars in venture capitalists. trying to get political power. It is that political power, unlike market share, does not respond to the injection of capital at the speed to which industry is accustomed.
Candidate
Mahan’s biography reads like an origin story concocted in a product management meeting. He graduated from Harvard University, where Mark Zuckerberg was a classmate and said he convinced him to go into technology instead of law school. He joined Causes, one of the earliest Facebook apps that allowed users to create groups around nonprofits, and rose from director of nonprofit partnerships to CEO as the platform grew to more than 186 million users in 157 countries. In 2014, he co-founded Brigade, a non-partisan citizen engagement platform backed by Sean Parker, Ron Conway and Marc Benioff, which was later acquired by Pinterest. He was elected mayor of San Jose in 2022. He announced his candidacy for governor on January 29, 2026, and within weeks the money was rolling in.
His campaign has raised $14 million directly, more than any other candidate in the race except billionaire climate investor Tom Steyer, who has self-funded more than $147 million and is on track to run the most expensive gubernatorial campaign in California history. But California Back to Basics, an independent expenditure committee legally barred from coordinating with Mahan’s campaign, spent nearly $20 million, including a $1.5 million Super Bowl ad, to promote him to voters outside San Jose. Among the committee’s biggest donors are venture capitalist Michael Moritz, who gave $3 million, and former Y Combinator CEO Michael Seibel, who contributed $1 million. Mahan received a maximum of $39,200 in individual donations from Brin, Hastings, Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale and Parker, among others.
Area
The problem is that $25 million in a 61-candidate primary doesn’t go as far as it does in a Series A. Former Fox News host Steve Hilton, who is supported by Donald Trump, received 20 percent of the vote in a poll conducted in the United States between April 28 and May 1. Steyer had 18 percent. Former Attorney General Xavier Becerra, who stepped up after Congressman Eric Swalwell’s withdrawal in mid-April, had 10 percent. Mahan and former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa were tied at four percent. State Comptroller Tony Thurmond was one percent. California holds its first two nonpartisan primaries, where the top two vote-getters, regardless of party, advance to the November general election. The likely result is a second round of Hilton-Steyer or Hilton-Becerra, and Mahan’s path to the first binary is too narrow to qualify as a rounding error.
The fusion of technological wealth and political power has become a defining feature of American governance in 2026.From Elon Musk’s role leading the Department of Government Efficiency to venture capitalists maximizing donations to both Mahan and Hilton. Lonsdale and Breen gave to both candidates. Bilateral hedging is standard practice in venture capital, where the goal is regulatory choice rather than ideological alignment. What is unusual about the Mahan campaign is the scale of the bet on a single candidate and the speed with which the thesis seems to fail. Enterprise-wise, Back to Basics has a burn rate of about five million dollars a month and a user acquisition value measured in voting points that would warrant an emergency board meeting of the startup.
Strategy
The logic behind Mahan’s candidacy goes beyond an election. Silicon Valley is seething over what it perceives as a hostile regulatory environment in Sacramento, and the 2026 cycle has given the industry an opportunity to push back on several fronts simultaneously. Y Combinator, a startup accelerator whose leadership has become increasingly vocal about California politicsrepresents a node of the network. Seibel, its former CEO, is Back to Basics’ largest individual donor. Its current CEO, Garry Tan, is said to be among the organizers of California Renewal, a proposed donation-style fund that aims to raise $500 million and potentially up to a billion to fund political activity during election cycles. The fund would give the tech billionaire class a permanent tool to fight unions, progressive advocacy groups and the ballot initiatives they support.
The closest target is a proposed November 2026 ballot measure that would impose a one-time five percent tax on the wealth of billionaires to fund health care, food aid and public education. The event’s sponsors reported collecting 1.6 million signatures in April, nearly double the 874,641 required to get on the ballot. Gov. Gavin Newsom has publicly opposed the tax. Tech donors who support Maha are also funding the campaign against the wealth tax. The governor’s race and the size of the ballot are two fronts in the same war, and the candidate who wins the governor’s mansion will either sign or veto the legislation that follows. Mahan has positioned himself as a pragmatic moderate unafraid to challenge his party, telling a CNN debate audience on May 5 that he is “the only Democrat in this race who is challenging the establishment within my party to demand better outcomes.” He said he supports taxing tech companies to fund workforce retraining, but opposes out-of-state regulation of them.
An example
The integration of Silicon Valley into American governance has accelerated since 2025creating a group of tech leaders in government roles and a political class that increasingly speaks the language of product management and disruption. The pattern at the federal level, where Musk’s operation DOGE canceled more than 10,000 federal contracts and the Trump administration appointed technology chiefs across agencies, is now being replicated at the state level. But California’s political dynamics are different from Washington. The state’s Democratic majority, its strong public sector unions, and its voters’ demonstrated appetite for progressive electoral measures create a structural environment in which money is a necessary but insufficient condition for political influence. Former eBay CEO Meg Whitman spent $178 million on her 2010 gubernatorial campaign, losing to Jerry Brown by 13 points. Former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina lost the 2010 Senate race to Barbara Boxer. The tech industry’s track record of turning capital into California’s political power is historically poor.
The technology industry’s relationship with the workforce it displaces has become a central political questionand Mahan’s candidacy sits at the heart of it. More than 78,000 tech workers were laid off in the first four months of 2026, and nearly half of those layoffs are due to AI replacing human roles. Mahan said he has deployed AI in San Jose city government and claims to be the only candidate with experience in both using and regulating the technology, but his donor base is made up of the same executives whose companies cut jobs. The tension between Mahan’s message of pragmatic moderation and the interests of his financial backers is at the heart of the tech industry’s political project: he wants to sit at the table in a situation where his decisions put people out of work, and he wants the people he puts out of work to vote for his candidate.
question
Venture capital priorities are changingfrom software to deep technology, from consumer applications to industrial infrastructure, from the weightless economy to the physical. Political priorities are also changing. For two decades, Silicon Valley viewed Sacramento as a state capital that could be controlled by inconsequential, haphazard lobbying and the threat of stealth displacement. Growing public skepticism about the proposed wealth tax, regulatory debate over artificial intelligence, and the industry’s social contract has changed that calculus. With $25 million behind Matt Mahan, a $500 million California Renewal donation and tens of millions more pouring into legislative races and ballot campaigns, it represents the industry’s most concerted effort yet to reshape politics in the state where most of its companies are headquartered.
Early returns are not encouraging. Mahan is a credible candidate with a solid message and a solid record of municipal governance. He’s also voting behind a self-funded billionaire who has spent $132 million, a former Fox News anchor endorsed by the president and a former attorney general who entered the race with statewide name recognition. The June 2 primary will determine whether $25 million in tech money can overcome the structural advantages of personal wealth, presidential approval and political power. Polling suggests it can’t. But the tech industry has never valued investment on a quarter-by-quarter basis, and the Mahan campaign, its donor networks, PAC structures, and infrastructure built around giving are designed to outperform any individual candidate. Silicon Valley isn’t trying to win the governor’s race. He is trying to build a political machine. The governor race is only a minimum viable product.
