For the second time in two years, billionaire Silicon Valley investor Michael Moritz has taken to the New York Times Opinion pages to spout off about San Francisco politics, and this time his aim seems to be to ensure no one includes Aaron Peskin on their ranked-choice ballots.

Billionaire Michael Moritz, who is the main funder of the San Francisco Standard and two political groups that have been pushing moderate candidates and causes, Together SF and Together SF Action, seems to hold some sway over at the New York Times. In July, in his role as a "Democratic megadonor," he used the paper's pulpit to send a loud message to President Biden that he needed to step out of the race. And in February 2023, he wrote an angry opinion essay laying out his arguments for how San Francisco's Board of Supervisors and bloat government had failed the city, writing that SF has been "held hostage by the political classes" and boasting that Together SF Action had helped unseat an incumbent supervisor several school board members.

Today, in the run-up to the mayoral election, Moritz has penned another New York Times opinion piece aimed squarely at one candidate, Aaron Peskin. Peskin has not been leading in any polls, however Moritz seems concerned that the city's ranked-choice voting system — which he has railed against in the past — might give Peskin a potential path to taking the mayor's office.

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

Together SF Action has endorsed Mark Farrell, and Moritz has made it clear that he blames progressives on the Board of Supervisors for everything from the fentanyl crisis to homelessness to the slowness of development. One of the group's stated purposes, as we learned last month from one of its own internal documents, is to stoke dissatisfaction and outrage among voters, to push them away from progressive candidates. (One of Together SF Action's more regrettable moves was that "That's Fentalife!" ad campaign, a tonally problematic and fairly pointless effort to poke fun at city leaders and their handling of the drug crisis.)

Moritz seems, with this essay, to want to rally against any possibility that Peskin could sneak into the mix after Election Day as ranked-choice ballots are tallied by convicing a few more SF voters who read the New York Times not to vote for him.

"As I’ve become increasingly involved in San Francisco, the city I have lived in for more than 40 years, I came to realize that Mr. Peskin and I represent clashing visions for the city’s future," Moritz writes.

It should be noted that Moritz is part of the cabal of billionaires, along with Laurene Powell Jobs, Marc Andreessen and others, who backed a plan to build a new city out of whole cloth in windswept eastern Solano County — a plan that is currently back-burnered 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 seems to, disingenuously, refer to this in the opinion essay as his "involvement in an ambitious plan to build a large housing development in northern San Francisco," which was something that "Mr. Peskin attacked." Is Solano County "northern San Francisco" now? [Correction: He may actually be referring to this proposed 17-story tower at 1088 Sansome that the cranky Telegraph Hill Dwellers will likely handily kill without any help from Peskin.]

Someone so concerned for San Francisco's future shouldn't, I would think, be hedging their bets with such an ambitious development that's an hour outside the city that goes against all smart growth and sustainability principals.

Moritz frames his essay around Kamala Harris and her more moderate vision of Democratic politics, and how that should be the model for San Francisco going forward, not Aaron Peskin. And, he writes, "This November’s elections will show whether [San Francisco's] citizens are ready to rebel against a coterie of longstanding political zealots."

Moritz does not get into the monied madness that has defined this mayoral race, in which two very wealthy white guys — Farrell and Levi's heir Daniel Lurie — are vying for the mayor's job, promising some measure of "change" that they might not be able to feasibly deliver, and trying to unseat the city's first Black female mayor, whose handling of the COVID pandemic Moritz has called "spectacular," by the way. Peskin is most likely, at this point, going to come in fourth behind these three, though, sure, ranked-choice and name recognition might give him an edge. So was this essay just another chance to bloviate about SF's progressives and how they must be blamed for everything that is wrong?

Previously: Leaked Document Reveals the Secrets of Billionaire-Funded TogetherSF, of ‘That’s Fentalife’ Fame