Sergey Brin just put half a million dollars into defeating a tax aimed at companies where the CEO makes a hundred times more than the median worker. That tells you how seriously Silicon Valley is taking this one. The part I want answered is simple: did San Francisco build this tax to actually bring in money, or mostly to make a point? Because those are very different tools. This is San Francisco Politics and Urbanism Daily for Thursday, May 21st. We’ve also got SFPD putting out surveillance video of an organized pickpocket crew in Chinatown, and the zoo loan story is back with the details that actually matter. Yeah — let’s start with the billionaire and the ballot measure. Here's Hoodline:
Google co‑founder Sergey Brin quietly dropped $500,000 into a San Francisco political fight, cutting a check to a committee opposing Proposition D, the city’s so‑called “overpaid CEO” tax. The half‑million comes as San Francisco’s long‑running tug‑of‑war over business taxes heats up, with labor and business groups already trading millions. Voters will weigh in on Prop D on June 2, and Brin’s money is expected to fuel a fresh wave of last‑minute ads and mailers.
Sergey Brin dropped half a million dollars into the fight against Prop D — that’s the June 2 ballot measure that would expand San Francisco’s existing CEO pay surcharge. And the key piece is that this isn’t starting from zero; the city already has the Top Executive Pay Tax, which kicks in when a company’s CEO-to-worker pay ratio hits 100-to-1 or higher. Prop D would change how that ratio gets calculated, using the global workforce instead of just local employees. What’s interesting here is that the existing tax was built to do two things at once: raise revenue and put pressure on pay inequality. Those goals pull in different directions. If companies reshape themselves to get under the threshold, the city loses revenue. If they don’t, you’re left collecting the money and hoping that counts as reform. Brin’s been spending in this space for a while — he’s also backed opposition to the proposed California billionaire tax through groups like Building a Better California. So this isn’t some one-off donation. I’d want to know whether his $500K is really aimed at the revenue, or at stopping the city from turning this pay-ratio idea into a broader template using global headcounts. Probably both, but I’d bet the mechanism is the bigger issue for him. Because once San Francisco starts using global workforces to calculate pay ratios, that’s a model other places can copy. And there’s still no real evidence this kind of tax changes CEO behavior — so workers are being told this is for them, while the city can’t point to a single dollar landing in their pocket because a CEO took a pay cut. So when a billionaire drops half a million into a San Francisco ballot fight over the so-called CEO tax, what is that tax actually doing — bringing in city revenue, punishing extreme pay gaps, or trying to do both at once? Both goals are built into the design, even if they fight each other. San Francisco already has the Top Executive Pay Tax — it charges companies a higher business tax rate when their highest-paid manager earns at least 100 times more than the company’s median worker. Proposition D, on the June 2026 ballot, would raise those rates by 800 to 900 percent starting in 2027, and it targets companies with at least a billion dollars in revenue, per the SPUR analysis. Supporters, including the labor coalition that launched the petition drive late last year, say it could raise hundreds of millions to cover looming cuts to healthcare, food assistance, and city services like SF General — that’s the revenue case. The inequality case is that companies would feel pressure to compress pay ratios to avoid the surcharge. The snag is obvious: if companies actually change behavior, the revenue forecast falls; if they don’t, critics say the tax doesn’t really solve inequality at all. And the city’s own chief economist warned it could cost San Francisco jobs and shrink what he called an already “shrinking” business base, per the SF Standard. If the company pays the tax and not the CEO personally, doesn’t that mean workers and consumers could end up absorbing the cost instead of the executives the measure is named after? That’s exactly what the Chronicle editorial board argued — that overpaid CEOs won’t pay a cent under Prop D, but the cost could get passed along in ways that hit workers and customers. What I’d watch in June is whether the supporters’ revenue projection or the city economist’s job-loss warning ends up looking closer to reality. That’s going to shape whether San Francisco tries to scale this kind of pay-ratio tax up, or backs off it. AOL, with Dryden Quigley:
Police are warning residents and visitors to stay alert as pickpocketing incidents rise in Chinatown, with officials saying organized groups can steal valuables in seconds. Newly released surveillance video from the San Francisco Police Department shows a trio working together to target unsuspecting victims. In the footage, two people act as lookouts while another reaches into a victim's bag, taking items within seconds.
SFPD put out surveillance video this week showing a three-person crew working Chinatown — two people creating the distraction, one person going into the bag, all of it over in seconds. One victim lost four thousand dollars in valuables before she even realized what happened; she only found out when fraud alerts started hitting her phone. This isn’t some random crime of opportunity — it’s a coordinated operation with roles and a playbook, and SFPD is putting the video out publicly because they want the community looking at these faces. That’s enforcement doing what it’s supposed to do. Now the real question is what happens when they actually catch somebody. Chinatown has come up a lot in this week’s crime coverage — the bail story, the DA debate — but this is a different kind of threat. Organized pickpocket crews aren’t the drug-market violence pattern that’s driven most of the policy fight. They’re quieter, faster, and that’s part of what makes them harder to prosecute. And that’s where the detention question gets real instead of abstract. If you arrest somebody from a crew like this and they’re back on the street before the video is even done processing, then swift consequences are just a slogan. Chinatown residents deserve more than a press release and a reminder to wear their bag in front. SFist writes:
The SF Board of Supervisors voted Tuesday to award the San Francisco Zoological Society, the nonprofit that oversees the zoo, with an $8.5 million loan to help keep the zoo running while it implements the required changes from the city’s audit from earlier this month. As NBC Bay Area reports, the nonprofit will first receive $2.5 million up front, and the remaining funds will be held until after the zoo implements facilities improvements and structural changes outlined in the audit.
Update on the zoo story — and this version is a lot more structured than Monday’s coverage made it sound. The city is releasing $2.5 million up front, and the remaining $6 million is being held until director Cassandra Costello hits a list of milestones from the city audit. So the condition attached to the deal wasn’t just talk — the money is literally staged. And now the zoo’s revenue recovery plan involves giant pandas, which — look, I respect the hustle, but panda advocates are already saying the zoo’s track record shows it can’t properly care for them. That’s not some abstract concern. If the Board’s condition is “boost revenue,” and the answer is an animal the zoo allegedly can’t manage, somebody should be asking whether that really counts as meeting the milestone. Supervisor Melgar put it pretty plainly: the city owns the land, the Zoological Society owns the animals, and she’s the one who requested the audit in the first place. So now we’re three days into zoo coverage, and somehow it’s getting more complicated every time. If you follow San Francisco politics closely, you may also like California Governor’s Race — daily 2026 coverage of candidates, polling, debates, fundraising, and policy for voters who want more than horse-race takes. Find it wherever you listen to podcasts.
You’ll find links to every story we talked about today in the show notes, if you want to dig further into the ones that caught your attention.
That’s San Francisco Politics and Urbanism Daily for today. This is a Lantern Podcast.