Local billionaire Michael Moritz writes another NYT op-ed, this time against Aaron Peskin

For the second time in two years, billionaire Silicon Valley investor Michael Moritz has taken to the opinion pages of The New York Times to weigh in on San Francisco politics, and this time his goal appears to be to make sure no one hears Aaron Peskin in his ranking. Electoral votes.

Billionaire Michael Moritz, the chief financial backer of the San Francisco Standard and two political groups that advance moderate candidates and causes, Together SF and Together SF Action, appears to have some influence at the New York Times. In July, in his role as a “Democratic megadonor,” he used the newspaper’s lectern to send a loud message to President Biden that he needed to get out of the race. And in February 2023, he wrote an angry opinion essay outlining his case for how the Board of Supervisors and San Francisco’s bloated government had failed the city and helped oust a sitting supervisor and several school board members.

Today, in the run-up to the mayoral election, Moritz wrote another New York Times opinion piece aimed directly at one candidate: Aaron Peskin. Peskin has not been leading in any poll, but Moritz appears concerned that the city’s ranked-choice voting system – which he has railed against in the past – could provide Peskin with a possible path to mayor.

“If you want to understand how the city got to where it is today and why it is at the center of a fight for its future [sic]“One should take a closer look at Mr. Peskin’s long career,” writes Moritz.

Together, SF Action has endorsed Mark Farrell, and Moritz has made it clear that he blames progressives on the board for everything from the fentanyl crisis to homelessness to the slow pace of development. One of the group’s stated goals, as we learned last month from one of its own internal documents, is to stoke discontent and outrage among voters and turn them away from progressive candidates. (One of Together SF Action’s more unfortunate moves was the “This is Fentalife!” advertising campaign, a tonally problematic and fairly pointless attempt to mock city leaders and their handling of the drug crisis.)

With this essay, Moritz seems to want to argue against any possibility that Peskin could sneak into the mix after Election Day while the ranked votes are being tallied by persuading a few more SF voters reading the New York Times will not vote for him.

“As I became increasingly involved in San Francisco, the city where I have lived for more than 40 years, it became clear to me that Mr. Peskin and I held opposing visions for the city’s future,” Moritz writes.

It should be noted that Moritz, along with Laurene Powell Jobs, Marc Andreessen and others, is part of the billionaire chain that backed a plan to build a new town out of wood in windswept eastern Solano County – a plan that is currently shelved-burned because of its political toxicity — essentially because they like the idea of ​​starting over and not dealing with the entrenched government and endemic problems of a place like San Francisco. Moritz appears to disingenuously characterize this in the opinion essay as his “involvement in an ambitious plan to build a large housing development north of San Francisco,” which “attacked Mr. Peskin.” Is Solano County now “north of San Francisco”?

In my opinion, someone who is so concerned about the future of San Francisco should not be hedging their bets with such an ambitious development, just an hour outside of the city, that runs counter to all principles of smart growth and sustainability.

Moritz bases his essay on Kamala Harris and her more moderate vision of democratic politics and how she should serve as a model for San Francisco in the future, not Aaron Peskin. And he writes: “The elections in November will show whether.” [San Francisco’s] Citizens are ready to rebel against a clique of long-standing political zealots.”

Moritz doesn’t get caught up in the money frenzy that has characterized this mayoral race, in which two very wealthy white men – Farrell and Levi’s heir Daniel Lurie – are vying for the mayor’s job and promising a degree of “change” that they may cannot achieve feasible delivery and attempt to unseat the city’s first black female mayor, whose handling of the COVID pandemic, by the way, Moritz described as “spectacular.” Peskin will most likely finish in fourth place behind those three at this point, although the ranking selection and name recognition could certainly give him an advantage. So was this essay just another opportunity to rave about the progressives of SF and how they need to be held responsible for everything that is wrong?

Previously: Leaked document reveals secrets of billionaire-funded TogetherSF and ‘That’s Fentalife’ fame