On a Friday night in late January, the leader of a famed San Francisco venture capital firm got drunk and launched into a profanity-laced tirade on social media.

Garry Tan, the Y Combinator CEO currently spearheading a tech-funded campaign to seize control of the city’s government, spent his long, strange night being publicly aggrieved by his usual foes: the progressive politicians he blames for the city’s ills.

He took things a step too far. Posting on X, formerly Twitter, Tan wished death upon a majority of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors.

“Fuck Chan Peskin Preston Walton Melgar Ronen Safai Chan as a label and motherfucking crew,” wrote Tan, name-checking seven progressive supervisors in a hypercringy attempt to adapt Tupac Shakur’s “Hit ’Em Up” to his drunken rants.

“Die slow motherfuckers.” For good measure, he posted a photo of his personal liquor cabinet. Its inscription: “Garry Tan, SF Social Media Troll. Twitter Menace.”

Tan specializes in such tantrums.
Over the past two years, he has established himself as the city’s chief Twitter attack dog.

But his activism extends beyond social media. He donated $100,000 to the recall campaign against District Attorney Chesa Boudin, who was ousted in June 2022. Two months later, Y Combinator appointed Tan as CEO.

“Garry is one of the most ‘YC’ people in the whole industry,” tweeted Sam Altman, the OpenAI CEO who formerly led Y Combinator, at the time.

“Also, it’s a big deal [in my opinion] that YC will have a CEO so active in local politics. I think YC can make a big difference here.”

Emboldened by the recall, Tan ramped up his ambitions — and his rhetoric.

Last July, he posted an angry YouTube screed in which he promised to “wipe out” progressive supervisors for raising safety concerns about driverless robotaxis.

“Peskin, Preston, Chan, Walton, Melgar, Ronen — your days are numbered,” said Tan in a finger-wagging screed.

His harangue aged poorly.

In October, a driverless Cruise vehicle pinned a pedestrian and dragged her 20 feet along the pavement. Cruise lost its operating permit, its top executives resigned, and General Motors slashed its investment.

The company, launched by Y Combinator in 2014, now faces a $1.5 million fine for allegedly hiding key facts from regulators.

Tan’s more recent drunk tweets also backfired pretty badly. As it turns out, assassination talk gets taken rather seriously in the city where Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk were murdered in 1978.

Within days, Tan’s targets began receiving death threats in their mailboxes.

“I don’t give a fuck,” Tan had declared during his tweetstorm.

But he soon changed course, deleting his alcohol-fueled rage posts and hiring a crisis P.R. firm to help with damage control as the negative headlines erupted.

A mandatory show of contrition was seemingly ordered: “I am sorry for my words and regret my poor decision,” he said in a statement.

It was a terrible first impression to make on voters, most of whom had probably never heard of their city’s new self-anointed political king until he became so flamboyantly unhinged and flew off the handle.

(Tan is notorious for having preemptively blocked half of the city, including most reporters, on Twitter.)

The meltdown also cracked Tan’s image as an unapologetic Elon Musk mini-me with grandiose plans to build a “parallel” society.

I mentioned Tan in a recent piece about wealthy techies trying to build privately governed cities as part of the “network state” movement.

In San Francisco, he is working on an adjacent strategy.

Instead of starting a new city, he wants to capture city government in November’s elections and hold it hostage to his demands.

Tan and fellow tech barons have promised to invest up to $15 million in local races.

Tech-funded front groups are rallying support for a slate of anti-progressive candidates who promise swift action to solve crime, homelessness, and drug addiction.

They frame their politics as “moderate,” but the terms “reactionary” and “right-wing” often fit better.

Their policy wish list reads like a Republican platform:
🔸more police funding (along with a repeal of police reform and criminal justice reform);
🔸a return to the “war on drugs” (with an emphasis on jailing homeless drug users);
🔸a rejection of harm reduction strategies like overdose prevention (in a city where 806 people died of overdoses last year);
🔸and the billionaire-funded expansion of mass video surveillance.

https://newrepublic.com/article/178675/garry-tan-tech-san-francisco