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# Silicon Valley wins SF, loses the nation
- URL: https://puml.media/silicon-valley-wins-sf-loses-the-nation/
- Published: 2026-11-06T19:20:11.000Z
- Updated: 2026-11-06T19:23:55.000Z
- Description: For now, San Francisco remains a sanctuary city for rich sociopaths and their political projects, but the future is up for grabs.
- Author: Dan Raile
- Tags: Dispatches

The successful recall of San Francisco’s district attorney and members of its school board earlier this decade inspired a new confidence among local tech investors and entrepreneurs that they could bully their way into a monopoly over political power as they had throughout the economy.

Speaking at the inaugural “Network State” conference hosted by Balaji Srinivasan, a luminary who went from roles at the VC firm Andreessen-Horowitz and crypto company Coinbase to theorize the future development of the nation state, Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan told a crowd in the Fall of 2023, “\[i\]f it works in San Francisco, it will work everywhere. And the cool part about it is, this is just getting started.”

Within a year, Elon Musk and Peter Thiel had bankrolled a successful Trump 2.0 presidential run and Silicon Valley personae took up roles in the Administration: Thiel acolyte JD Vance as Vice President, PayPal mafioso David Sacks as a AI and Crypto Czar, former Uber bagman Emil Michael as CTO of the Department of War, and so on forever. Tech executives made regular salutary trips to the White House, hyping and funding Trump’s initiatives, and shaping the Administration’s policies while collecting government contracts at every level. Musk himself took up the helm and chainsaw of an ersatz “department of efficiency”, wreaking substantial creative destruction.

Here in San Francisco, these same men and their business buddies celebrated the defeat of progressivism and closed ranks around an old money neophyte mayor who would usher in their vision of rampant Reaganism and total surveillance. And while Mayor Daniel Lurie and his tech industry supporters did well in this week’s San Francisco and California state elections, the influence of their overwhelming spending throughout races elsewhere in the country seems to have found its limit. The midterms were cast as a referendum on data centers, surveillance, and bloodthirsty imperialism. That’s now the Silicon Valley brand, and US voters repudiated it.

For now, San Francisco remains a sanctuary city for rich sociopaths and their political projects, but the future is up for grabs.