Ron Conway, Garry Tan, and Michael Moritz
The Billionaire Techies Taming San Francisco
They call it "moderation." I call it a death sentence. Ron Conway, Michael Moritz, and Garry Tan are not trying to save San Francisco—they are trying to scrub it clean of the poor, the sick, and the addicted, using policies that have been proven, time and again, to kill.
This isn't hyperbole. When you defund harm reduction to hire more cops, when you criminalize survival instead of funding housing, when you strip mental health services to punish rather than heal—people die on our sidewalks. And these three billionaires are bankrolling that outcome with a smile.
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Ron Conway: The Indifferent Kingmaker
Conway poses as a reasonable Democrat, the quiet godfather whispering in mayors' ears. Don't be fooled. He has spent decades propping up corporate-friendly politicians who cut mental health beds and slashed rental assistance while smiling at tech donors. His recent tantrum over Marc Benioff's Trump support was performative theater—a distraction from the fact that Conway's preferred "moderates" have consistently voted to increase police budgets while defunding the very street teams that save lives during overdoses.
He is the establishment face of a movement that treats human dignity as a bargaining chip. His "pragmatism" is just privilege dressed up as wisdom. While he dines with billionaires, our unhoused neighbors freeze because his allies won't fund enough shelter beds.
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Michael Moritz: The Prophet of Austerity
Moritz is the most dangerous of the three because he has an intellectual veneer. He writes elegant New York Times essays framing progressive governance as failure, but read between the lines: his solution is always more policing, less oversight, and the elimination of district supervisors. He wants to centralize power because he knows the neighborhoods that would lose their voice—the Mission, the Tenderloin, Bayview—are the very communities that would reject his cruelty.
His TogetherSF machine is a propaganda operation disguised as civic concern. He pours millions into attacking harm reduction, pushing "forced treatment" models that have zero evidence of long-term success. Forced detox doesn't save lives—it chases people into alleys where they use alone and die alone. Moritz's austerity agenda starves the very services that could actually heal. He is not an intellectual. He is an executioner with a spreadsheet.
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Garry Tan: The Virtual Tormentor
And then there's Garry Tan—the man who told seven elected supervisors to "die slow." That wasn't a slip. That was a confession. He literally wished death on public servants, and now he wants to shape policy for the most vulnerable people in our city.
Tan is the movement's digital attack dog, flooding social media with dehumanizing rhetoric about "open air drug markets" and "lawlessness." He uses that fear to justify sweeps—those grotesque spectacles where the city bulldozes tents and throws away medications, IDs, and the last shreds of stability. Every sweep disconnects someone from their caseworker. Every destroyed tent pushes someone deeper into isolation. And in isolation, overdose is not a risk—it is an inevitability.
His "Garry's List" isn't about moderation. It's about vengeance against a progressive movement that dared to treat addicts as humans deserving of compassion.
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A Machine Built on Blood
Together, these three have built a coordinated machine—TogetherSF, GrowSF, Neighbors for a Better SF—that funnels dark money into a single objective: punish poverty. Their wins—the recalls, the 2024 supermajority—weren't democratic shifts. They were hostile takeovers funded by wealth so obscene it can buy a city council.
Their agenda is transparent: more cops, more jails, more sweeps. Less housing, less mental health care, less harm reduction. They frame this as "common sense," but the data is incontrovertible—cities that embrace carceral approaches see overdose deaths spike. San Francisco's own health department has warned that forced displacement kills. They don't care. They care about property values and sightlines.
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The Final Toll
They say if they can do it here, they can do it anywhere. What they mean is: if we let them experiment with cruelty on our streets, they'll export this playbook to every American city.
This isn't about "moderation." It's about class war waged by tech royalty against the powerless. Every dollar they pour into policing is a dollar taken from a nurse, a shelter worker, an overdose prevention specialist. Every vote they buy is a vote to turn our city into a gated compound for the rich while the rest of us are swept aside.
If their vision succeeds, people will die. Not metaphorically. Not tragically as a side effect. They will die because these men decided their comfort was worth more than human life. And when that happens, history won't remember them as saviors. It will remember them as the billionaires who turned their backs while San Francisco bled out on the pavement.
