CA-GOV: Sorry, Silicon Valley, it isn't that easy to buy an election

Just minutes after the polls closed on Tuesday night, Matt Mahan — the great gubernatorial hope of Silicon Valley, the moderate mayor and pro-business pragmatist who would swoop in to save the billionaires from the unions and the leftists who have overtaken California — took the stage at a decidedly unglamorous election watch party in San Jose and conceded defeat.

Surrounded by neighbors, supporters, and, noticeably, none of the famous Silicon Valley billionaires who’d promised him the world — or, at least, the state — he thanked his campaign staff and professed excitement for returning to his day job as mayor of San Jose. Later, asked if he thought the influx of tech money had not floated his campaign but sunk it, he shrugged: “You can’t pick your donors.”
Spurred by a proposed billionaire tax and years of grievances about rampant spending and public-sector union power, Silicon Valley leaped into the California political fray this year, spending tens of millions on Mahan and other candidates in the hope that they would turn an increasingly populist political sentiment in their favor. But tech money, it turns out, can’t buy you strategy.

Across the state, candidates propped up by tech moguls, including Sergey Brin, Michael Moritz, Reed Hastings, and Ron Conway, failed in top-line races. The places where Silicon Valley saw true victories were where the moguls played politics as usual, quietly funneling money into candidates for state legislative races and super PACs with longer time horizons, rather than flashy avatars of rich-guy rage.

The lesson, as one longtime adviser put it, is that “politics isn’t the same as investing in a startup. Stop trying to think that because you made a good call on investing in a SaaS company, you know what you’re doing in terms of electing a governor.




https://sfstandard.com/2026/06/03/matt-mahan-silicon-valley-billionaires-election/