By Anand Giridharadas 

The beef of the Bay Area's billionaires began when one magnate broadcast a message on an app invented by another. "Homelessness is all of our responsibility," Marc Benioff, the founder and co-C.E.O. of Salesforce wrote on Twitter earlier this month, endorsing a controversial ballot measure known as Prop C, which would raise taxes on the biggest businesses in San Francisco to pay for homeless programs. Four days and some two billion tweets later, Jack Dorsey, Twitter's co-founder and C.E.O., used the quote-tweet feature of his app to criticize Benioff's call to arms. "I want to help fix the homeless problem in SF and California," he said. "I don't believe this (Prop C) is the best way to do it." I don't believe it. 

Thus began a strange and revealing digital battle between a pair of Silicon Valley moguls about democracy, wealth, power, and those their revolution has forsaken and displaced. On the surface, Benioff and Dorsey are rather different men. Benioff, barrel-chested, avuncular, and garrulous, is his own P.R. man, for better or worse, as well as the latest owner of Time magazine. Dorsey, slender, stylish, and twelve years younger, is more guarded, even with his four million Twitter followers. But the two men, who claim to be friends, are both members of the Silicon Valley élite, a superclass at once consumed and blinded by money, world-changing fantasies, and self-preserving reflexes.

San Francisco's homelessness is an unavoidable part of the landscape—the tents, the tarps, the claimed doorways, the panhandling, the needles—sights all the more striking in a city so full of purportedly radical, globally transformative innovation. The city counted 7,499 homeless people among its ranks last year, a number that has actually fallen by thirteen per cent since 2004, when San Francisco, under a new mayor, Gavin Newsom, launched a sweeping "Ten Year Plan to End Chronic Homelessness." San Francisco has doubled the money it spends on homelessness and the street population has fallen," the San Francisco Chronicle wrote in June. "So why does the problem feel worse than ever?" Among the answers it gave: Weariness: The decades-old problem lends itself to a perception that it has no end in sight." But there's another aspect of the city that makes its homelessness problem stick out: the metropolitan area had seventy-four billionaire residents in 2017, according to one independent report, up from sixty the year before. If the Bay Area were a country, it would be ranked ninth in the world for its billionaire population. There are about a hundred homeless San Franciscans for every billionaire, and, presumably, more than enough resources to go around.

Proposition C, which will be on city ballots on November 6th, proposes a modest tax, of less than a per cent, on the gross receipts of the largest businesses in the city, and would devote the two hundred and fifty to three hundred million dollars that the city expects to reap from that tax "to homelessness services in the city, including housing, mental health services, shelters, and rental assistance," according to a City Hall report. This is the plan that Benioff, of Salesforce, endorses. When Dorsey quote-tweet-criticized it, Benioff, eight minutes later, struck back: "Hi Jack. Thanks for the feedback. Which homeless programs in our city are you supporting?" That, soon enough, drew a retort from Dorsey:"Marc: you're distracting. This is about me supporting Mayor @LondonBreed for the reason she was elected. The Mayor doesn't support Prop C, and we should listen to her.”

Dorsey was bringing up a further complication: San Francisco's newly elected mayor, London Breed, had recently come out against the proposal. An African-American progressive who grew up in poverty and in public housing in the city's Western Addition neighborhood, Breed ran on a platform of addressing the homelessness issue. In March, three months before the special election to replace Mayor Ed Lee, who died unexpectedly while in office, she laid out a four-thousand-plus-word plan for "a San Francisco where no one is forced, relegated, or allowed to sleep on the streets, and where no one endures addiction or mental illness on the streets without supportive and effective services."  And yet, earlier this month, she came out against Prop C, declaring the flight of companies and jobs from the city "inevitable" if the new tax went into effect. She worried that a sudden infusion of money could "make our homelessness problem worse," by attracting more homeless people to San Francisco. The city already spends more than three hundred million dollars a year on homeless programs, she argued, and doesn't necessarily spend it effectively. "Before we double the tax bill overnight,"she said, "San Franciscans deserve accountability for the money they are already paying."

In a time of extreme inequality, a growing backlash against big technology (a.k.a. the #techlash), and democratic dysfunction, Benioff and Dorsey, two white-guy billionaires, were arguing over how best to help their city's poor and vulnerable. Benioff wanted to pay higher taxes, as the city’s biggest employer, and wanted to achieve that policy via a referendum. But his faith in the people is bolstered by the fact that he has plans to spend $1.5 million of his own money and five hundred thousand dollars of Salesforce's money on the campaign to persuade the people of the wisdom of his view. Dorsey, for his part, wanted the democratically elected mayor to lead the way—a stance of deference to the people’s will that happened to dovetail with a more parochial interest. There are concerns that the way the proposed tax is written will overcharge companies that facilitate financial transactions. Dorsey has said that he fears that the other large company he runs, the payment-processing business Square, would see a twenty-million-dollar tax increase in 2019 under the proposition, while Salesforce, with several times more employees, would pay less than ten million. In a tweet, Dorsey admitted that the tax issue was part of "our corporate hesitation and considerations (separate from my personal ones)."

The tax issue inevitably brings up the so-called Twitter tax break. In 2011, Twitter, which was situated in San Francisco, threatened to leave the city limits for a new headquarters down the peninsula in the South Bay, where Google, Facebook, Apple, and other tech giants are based. "Twitter said the deal-breaker was a payroll tax levied only inside city limits; with plans to double their staff, the company felt it couldn't justify the cost," according to a Time report, Lee, who was the mayor at the time, offered the company (and several others) a multi-million-dollar tax benefit to stay. "Twitter elected to locate itself in San Francisco only after it received massive tax breaks from the city, thereby diminishing city revenue for the full array of public services that any well-functioning city requires," Rob Reich, a Stanford political scientist and the author of the new book "Just Giving: Why Philanthropy Is Failing Democracy and How It Can Do Better," told me.

In a phone interview, I asked Dorsey if, in retrospect, it was a mistake for Twitter to have taken the benefit. "Should we have taken that? I don’t know,"he said. I asked whether, Prop C aside, he thought taxes should be raised on him and his fellow-billionaires. "Hell yes," he said. "I think one of the existential crises facing the world, not just San Francisco, not just California or the United States, is economic disparity. And I think it is on me to help address that directly." He told me that he wants to make that issue the focus of his philanthropy, noting that he has already been doing "a huge number of smaller, more tactical things," donating to local orphanages and other "children-focussed" efforts.

From New Yorker