Tech billionaires are leveraging tens of millions of dollars to influence California politics in a marked uptick from their previous participation in affairs at the state capitol. Behemoths such as Google and Meta are getting involved in campaigns for November’s elections, as are venture capitalists, cryptocurrency entrepreneurs and Palantir’s co-founders. The industry’s goals run the gamut – from fighting a billionaire tax to supporting a techie gubernatorial candidate to firing up new, influential super political action committees (Pacs).

The phenomenon squarely fits the moment for the state’s politics – with 2026 being the year that Politico has dubbed “the big tech flex”.

Gavin Newsom, California’s tech-friendly governor who’s been quick to veto legislation that cramps the sector’s unfettered growth, is reaching his term limit. That means Silicon Valley needs to find a new ally. The industry may have found its candidate in an upstart mayor from San Jose, Matt Mahan.

Silicon Valley’s businesses and billionaires – some of the richest and most powerful on earth, most of which are headquartered in California – are in the midst of a massive AI boom. Industry insiders say tech companies need to ensure they can continue to flourish without regulations getting in the way.

“This is a golden opportunity and a golden moment for tech to reset its priorities and its perceptions,” said David McCuan, a political science professor at Sonoma State University who studies state lobbying.

Rather than going all-in on one candidate or issue, McCuan said the tech sector is using a multi-pronged attack in California. Tech billionaires are contributing to campaigns ranging from candidates for governor to local city council and school board races. They are also donating heavily to groups campaigning for relaxed taxation and minimal regulation around AI.

“If you’re an uber-zillionaire, you give money early and often,” McCuan said. “They have more wealth and resources than they’ve ever had before, so that allows them to play on both sides of the aisle and up and down the ballot and across issues like never before.”

Unlike other industries, such as oil and pharma, tech has been relatively tame when it comes to lobbying in the state. The industry has tended to focus on narrow state issues and instead spent big and broad at the federal level (aside from Uber and Lyft’s massive $200m ballot measure campaign in 2020). That ethos has changed. California is now ground zero for tech titans working to become omnipresent in politics.

Robert Singleton, the senior director of policy in California for the tech industry group Chamber of Progress, said this moment has been brewing for a long time and it just needed the right thing to set it off.

“The introduction of that billionaire tax obviously galvanized a lot of wealthy individuals who don’t want to see that happen, and who will spend money to make sure it doesn’t happen,” Singleton said. “That tipped them into wanting to get more involved.”

Billionaires fight a tax

The “California Billionaire Tax Act”, often referred to simply as the billionaire tax, is a proposal that would require any California resident worth more than $1bn to pay a one-off, 5% tax on their assets to help cover education, food assistance and healthcare programs in the state. It’s sponsored by the Service Employees International Union-United Healthcare Workers West, and if it receives enough signatures from California voters, it will go to the ballot in November.

When the proposal was put forward at the end of last year, many among tech’s billionaire elite threw a tantrum.

Some opened offices or bought mansions in Florida or Texas, vowing to leave California for good. The fleeing rich included Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel, whose current net worth is $25bn; Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, worth around $255bn and $240bn respectively; and Donald Trump’s AI and crypto czar, David Sacks, whose net worth is not publicly known. Earlier this week, the Wall Street Journal reported that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, worth $229bn, has also bought a property in south Florida valued between $150 and $200m.

Thiel has additionally led the charge in donating to a lobbying group, the California Business Roundtable, which has pledged to fight the wealth tax. The Palantir co-founder handed over $3m to the political action committee in late December. Other major donors include realtors, entrepreneurs and private equity firms. James Siminoff, who founded the camera-embedded Ring doorbell company, also donated $100,000, according to public records.

“The most powerful money in politics is to be on the no-side of a ballot measure,” said McCuan. “You can even pre-empt something getting to the ballot, like a billionaire’s tax, by explaining to everyone out there that this is a bad idea for economic growth.”

Tech investors and venture capitalists have been extremely vocal in their opposition to the tax, saying that the state will lose revenue as billionaires flee and it will hurt the state’s ability to be economically competitive.

Just this week, Chamath Palihapitiya, a former Facebook executive and current venture capital investor, wrote “the loss of this tax revenue was totally avoidable but is now forever”. Balaji Srinivasan, an investor and former chief technology officer of Coinbase, wrote, “the most successful tech founders of all time have now exited the failed state of California”.

Adding on, Paul Graham, the co-founder of seed capital firm Y Combinator, wrote: “It’s important that people like Zuck and Larry Page are willing to move in response to the proposed wealth tax. It shows politicians what will happen if they try things like this.”

Joining the billionaires, Newsom has pledged to fight the tax, saying it will “drive a race to the bottom” and stifle innovation as the ultra-wealthy leave. “This will be defeated – there’s no question in my mind,” Newsom told the New York Times in January. “I’ll do what I have to do to protect the state.”

Super Pacs aplenty

Outcry over taxes is just one of the ways the tech sector is ramping up its influence campaign. Several Super Pacs have popped up over the past few months and tech is injecting these committees with tens of millions.

McCuan said this strategy is helpful for the ultra-wealthy because it allows them to stay behind the scenes, while donating limitless money.

“You could create some amorphous sounding organization like ‘Californians for All That is Good and Right Under the Sun’,” McCuan said. “And who knows what the hell that is, but that entity becomes the vehicle to which others give money … and it becomes very difficult to unpeel and unfurl what is going on.”

Meta launched two new Super Pacs last fall, which are focused on dialing back AI regulation and supporting AI-friendly candidates. The company contributed $45m to one, the American Technology Excellence Project, which will operate in several states but hasn’t yet established a committee in California. The other, Mobilizing Economic Transformation Across (Meta) California, is state-specific and has received one $20m contribution from Meta.

The social media giant has also matched Google in infusing a separate Super Pac called California Leads with a total of $10m. Ron Conway, a longtime Democratic tech donor, has also donated $100,000 to this committee, which says it aims to support favorable candidates in the state but will not just focus on issues affecting the tech industry, according to Politico.

The crypto industry is getting into Super Pacs too, debuting a group called Grow California. The committee opened with $10m from crypto executive Chris Larsen and evangelist Tim Draper. Larsen told the New York Times he plans to give $30m more. The focus of Grow California is to “rebuild a state capital” and shape the state’s legislature.

“We have a group of people who are not acting in a pragmatic way. They’re not looking for balance. They’re completely fucking owned by one side,” Larsen, who’s the chair of crypto company Ripple, told Politico. “So we’re going to work on taking out those people who are not working for the people of California.”

While the tech industry is now pushing its influence at the state level, San Francisco has already experienced many of these same tactics at the city level. Backed with Silicon Valley money, several different 501(c)(4) groups formed over the past couple election cycles to throw support behind preferred mayoral and board of supervisor candidates. They also bankrolled successful recall campaigns for a progressive district attorney and members of the school board.

A new tech-friendly governor?

The California governor’s race has been a crowded field without notable frontrunners. Newsom had been a long-time friend of the tech industry, hosting Google’s Page and Brin as guests at his wedding and referring to Salesforce chief executive Marc Benioff as “family”. His departure appears to have Silicon Valley fretting.

Singleton, from the Chamber of Progress, said Newsom had long recognized “how pivotal the technology industry is in California”.

But then, late last month, Mahan, a moderate Democrat and the mayor of San Jose, announced his candidacy. Before Mahan got involved in politics in 2020, he had a career in the tech sector. He was an undergraduate at Harvard with Zuckerberg, and in 2014 co-founded a startup with funding from Conway, Benioff and Napster co-founder Sean Parker.

Mahan appears to be the savior the tech industry had been searching for. Since his candidacy announcement just two weeks ago, millions have poured into his campaign. According to public records, he’s received donations from several venture capitalists, along with Roblox CEO David Baszucki, Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan, GitHub co-founder Chris Wanstrath, Cloudkitchen co-founder Diego Berdakin, and Ring founder Siminoff.

Mahan has even courted donors who helped launch companies known for working with the Trump administration, including Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale and Anduril co-founder Matt Grimm and his wife Kimberly Grimm, according to public records.

Google’s Brin has also backed Mahan, maxing out the limit for an individual campaign donation at $78,400. Several of Mahan’s other tech backers also maxed out their donations. At this point, Mahan has now raised more than double the two most prominent democrats in the race, Eric Swalwell and Katie Porter.

As political races and ballot measure campaigns continue to heat up across California in 2026, tech’s influence is only expected to grow.

“It’s going to be a fun session,” Singleton said. That’s for sure.”