In 2011, then San Francisco mayor Ed Lee, recently appointed after Gavin Newsom vacated the role to become California’s lieutenant governor, signaled the city elite’s further embrace of Silicon Valley when he helped facilitate the transformation of a vacant department store on Market Street into Twitter’s new headquarters.
Working to avert the social media app’s threat to flee the city, Lee helped it relocate its headquarters from “SoMA” (short for South of Market, an industrial neighborhood dominated by, increasingly, converted warehouses) to a more centrally located 1939 art deco building spanning an entire city block that, since the mid 1980s, had been vacant of its former retail tenants.
To lure Twitter, Mayor Lee designated “Mid-Market” as a new tech corridor. Inserted into the hollowed-out physical spaces of the city’s industrial past, the growth of tech held the promise of trickle-down economic development. At least, this was the justification for allowing Twitter and the tech firms who followed it to the neighborhood to be exempt from payroll taxes — the value of this tax break was later estimated to be about $70 million.
Fast-forward to the fall of 2023 when Elon Musk, new owner of the company San Franciscans had subsidized, took to “X, formerly Twitter” with a series of attacks on a member of the city’s Board of Supervisors, its sole democratic socialist member: “Dean Preston should be in prison for what he’s done to San Francisco.” Around the same time, Musk committed to joining right-wing venture capitalist Garry Tan in contributing $100,000 as seed funding for the effort to remove Preston from office (Tan had pledged $50,000).
Tan, who heads the tech incubator Y Combinator, has sought to turn the…
Auteur: Eric Peterson
