Chris Larsen didn’t start out rich. He was born in San Francisco, the son of an aircraft mechanic and a freelance illustrator. After starting a string of successful companies and amassing a $13 billion fortune, he’s become the face of a billionaires’ revolt.
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In June, voters in San Francisco will decide whether to impose an eight-fold increase to a gross-receipts tax on any large company doing business in the city where the highest paid executive earns 100 times or more than their median employee. Fighting the union-backed proposal, along with a separate push for a California wealth tax, has thrust Larsen into a head-on clash with labor.
“Labor correctly has determined that business is weak and they won’t stand up to them,” Larsen said in an interview. “It’s the same calculation here in San Francisco, that we just don’t have the guts to fight.”
The so-called
Scott Mann, a spokesperson for the campaign backing the measure, said if businesses can afford large pay packages for top executives, they should be able to send more money to city coffers. “What we’re witnessing now is the billionaires’ vision for California,” said Mann. “They are essentially willing to defund public services to protect their own wealth.”
Larsen and other entrepreneurs, unnerved by the election of democratic socialist Mayor Zohran Mamdani in New York and increasing calls across the US for taxes on wealth, fear that the measure could undo efforts to make San Francisco more business-friendly. They’re backing a competing measure to lower the tax, which was approved by voters in 2020 and scaled back four years later as San Francisco sought to coax back business activity that fled during the pandemic.
In 2024, voters elected a new mayor, Democrat Daniel Lurie, who is an heir to the Levi-Strauss fortune. Lurie’s centrism
“He made his pitch, then he asked us basically to work it out,” said Wade Rose, who leads a business coalition called
Less than a month later, the two sides gathered again, this time at the sleek offices of Larsen’s cryptocurrency company, Ripple. (Ripple, which is a private company that doesn’t disclose CEO compensation, declined to comment on whether they would be subject to the tax.) The meeting was brokered by Louis Giraudo, a well-known lawyer and businessman whose family popularized San Francisco sourdough.
Giraudo urged the labor leaders to “realize that you can talk to these people and get something done,” he said. “I don’t think anyone really wanted a fight.”
Despite Giraudo’s diplomatic touch, those talks also fizzled — to the dismay of Larsen, who had cast himself as a local-born everyman eager for a truce. Larsen aired his frustration at a gala at the Fairmont Hotel where he was inducted into a San Francisco business hall of fame, taking a place alongside real estate magnate Walter Shorenstein and finance luminary Charles Schwab.
“We have to be prepared, all of us, for a permanent political fight,” Larsen said at the event. Businesses have got “to fight on par with the unions when they are proposing stupid, job-killing ideas.”
Larsen’s politics defy easy classification. A major Democratic donor who backed Kamala Harris, he is beloved by climate activists for his support of their causes. Ripple also donated $4.9 million to Trump’s inauguration.
In the current environment, “you better be having unlikely allies,” Larsen said, arguing that he wants to pull both Republicans and Democrats toward the center. But the entrepreneur has been especially forceful in opposing progressive groups and unions he says want to treat business leaders as punching bags.
Since 2025, Larsen and his company have funneled more than $19.6 million into groups that support pro-business politics, lawmakers and ballot measures. With fellow crypto billionaire Tim Draper, he started a political group to help elect centrist Democrats and Republicans to the California statehouse.
Progressive leaders have used Larsen’s public comments to stir up their supporters. A video of Larsen calling for business to “stop being so meek and so weak,” and to “fight on par with the unions” was shared widely by labor groups.
Officials concerned about San Francisco’s affordability have been critical of Larsen and other business interests they see as refusing to address the city’s economic strains.
“If billionaires can afford to peel off millions to involve themselves in local politics they can afford to pay these taxes,” said Aaron Peskin, a former member of the city’s Board of Supervisors. He believes Larsen’s influx of money will have a short-lived impact once “San Francisco wakes up to the fact that people who are buying favors from Trump’s authoritarian administration are trying to have their way here.”
For Lurie, the tax fight amounts to a rupture of the labor-corporate peace and “open for business” message his election was supposed to represent. The new mayor promised to bridge the divide between the Bay Area’s business community and its working class in a lasting fashion, but now, some business leaders fear the city is backsliding.
“This tax coming on the horizon seems like a throwback from an earlier era in San Francisco politics,” said Jay Cheng, who until last week led a group called
Lurie said in a statement that the tax fight is a “clear sign of a broken system that rewards insiders at the expense of everyday San Franciscans.” He has lashed out at both labor and business, arguing that neither side’s efforts will improve the city’s economic outlook. Lurie is supporting a November ballot measure that would make it harder to place similar initiatives before voters.
“We cannot be complacent about our recovery, and dueling proposals that produce longer, more confusing ballots reward division over consensus,” Lurie said.
Some of the players involved said Lurie is still trying to figure out how to balance competing prerogatives without damaging his relationships. “He’s new to this,” said Rose, the Advance SF leader.
A person familiar with Lurie’s thinking said the mayor is trying to maintain his relationship with the city’s largest unions, who he needs to back other priorities from reforming San Francisco’s arcane city charter to backing a real estate tax to fund the local transit authority. Those ties were strained after Lurie laid off more than 100 city workers this month, with more potential cuts looming, as he seeks to close San Francisco’s deficit.
Larsen, meanwhile, isn’t backing down.
Through mid-April, he had poured about $700,000 into fighting the executive tax, according to campaign filings, and along with his wife, the philanthropist Lyna Lam, gave $2 million to a committee supporting Lurie’s efforts to “clean up city hall” by empowering the mayor and making it more difficult to get initiatives on the ballot.
Larsen has spent hundreds of thousands more to support a sales tax to fund local transit and an infrastructure bond, both priorities for Lurie. And he has given more than $10 million to fund city street sweepings, Christmas-tree lightings, police-surveillance cameras and other civic projects.
Nationally, he has emerged as a defender of businesses that he feels have been unfairly targeted by politicians, regardless of party. He has backed an ad campaign against US Representative Chip Roy, a Texas Republican, over his opposition to clean energy-subsidies. Roy, undeterred by the ad push, has vowed to double down on his anti-green agenda.
Larsen, whose father was a union member, said he wants San Francisco labor leaders to know he isn’t an “arrogant billionaire who’s looking down on them,” and respects their effectiveness. “There needs to be a lot more dialogue,” he said in a conference room at Ripple’s offices. At the same time, Larsen said he won’t shrink from confrontation.
“It’s fine if things are uncomfortable,” Larsen said, leaning back in his chair. “I like conflict.”
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