00:00This is getting a lot of attention, a lot of readers. It's a key race. San Jose's mayor is a
00:05name that's come up a lot in the last few months.
00:09What's changed? What's new? And what are we learning about the pool of people backing it?
00:14Yeah, well, San Jose's Matt Mahan, after Eric Swalwell exited the race, has seen kind of a rush of some
00:21of the wealthiest people in California coming in to support him.
00:24And these are tech people, some of them.
00:26A lot of tech people. We have Vinod Khosla, who put a million dollars towards his campaign yesterday.
00:32Mike Moritz of Sequoia, Reed Hastings of Netflix. Really big names in Silicon Valley and in California have coalesced around
00:41his campaign.
00:42And they're backing the outside committee. They're sending millions of dollars towards him. Yeah.
00:48Why do the billionaires like him so much? What is Matt Mahan really thinking about for them?
00:54Yeah, well, Matt kind of he emerged in the scene first when he opposed a wealth tax that's being proposed
01:02in California.
01:03There's a proposal to tax billionaire wealth and that kind of helped him gain some of these supporters.
01:09But in a wider sense, I think Silicon Valley is trying to insert itself in California's political scene beyond just
01:17the issues that their singular companies care about and more in kind of a wider sense.
01:22They're trying to promote a moderate Democratic policies as they see it.
01:27So that manifests itself in another way.
01:29Very quickly, you wrote about this five hundred million dollar funds to influence California politics.
01:34That was on March 12th. But again, tech names are putting into that fund.
01:38A lot of tech names. If you know Neil Mehta from Green Oaks Capital.
01:43A lot of VCs are they're coalescing as kind of this network effect.
01:47I mean, Sergey Brin, the co-founder of Google, has been big in creating his own interest group to influence
01:54California politics.
01:55They're all about trying to kind of create government in California that is a little less progressive, more in the
02:02moderate sense, a little more anti-tax and is about kind of creating efficiency and a little more pro-tech
02:08as well.
Comments