Silicon Valley, the New Lobbying Monster

By Charles Duhigg
October 7, 2024
The corner of dollar bills laid out in a grid representing binary code.
A person familiar with Fairshake, a super pac, said that the group had 
“a simple message”: “If you are pro-crypto, we will help you, and if 
you are anti we will tear you apart.”Illustration by Javier Jaén

One morning in February, Katie Porter was sitting in bed, futzing 
around on her computer, when she learned that she was the target of a 
vast techno-political conspiracy. For the past five years, Porter had 
served in the House of Representatives on behalf of Orange County, 
California. She’d become famous—at least, C-span and MSNBC famous—for 
her eviscerations of business tycoons, often aided by a whiteboard that 
she used to make camera-friendly presentations about corporate greed. 
Now she was in a highly competitive race to replace the California 
senator Dianne Feinstein, who had died a few months earlier. The 
primary was in three weeks.

A text from a campaign staffer popped up on Porter’s screen. The 
staffer had just learned that a group named Fairshake was buying 
airtime in order to mount a last-minute blitz to oppose her candidacy. 
Indeed, the group was planning to spend roughly ten million dollars.

Porter was bewildered. She had raised thirty million dollars to 
bankroll her entire campaign, and that had taken years. The idea that 
some unknown group would swoop in and spend a fortune attacking her, 
she told me, seemed ludicrous: “I was, like, ‘What the heck is 
Fairshake?’ ”

Porter did some frantic Googling and discovered that Fairshake was a 
super PAC funded primarily by three tech firms involved in the 
cryptocurrency industry. In the House, Porter had been loosely 
affiliated with Senator Elizabeth Warren, an outspoken advocate of 
financial regulation, and with the progressive wing of the Democratic 
Party. But Porter hadn’t been particularly vocal about cryptocurrency; 
she hadn’t taken much of a position on the industry one way or the 
other. As she continued investigating Fairshake, she found that her 
neutrality didn’t matter. A Web site politically aligned with Fairshake 
had deemed her “very anti-crypto”—though the evidence offered for this 
verdict was factually incorrect. The site claimed that she had opposed 
a pro-crypto bill in a House committee vote: in fact, she wasn’t on the 
committee and hadn’t voted at all.

Soon afterward, Fairshake began airing attack ads on television. They 
didn’t mention cryptocurrencies or anything tech-related. Rather, they 
called Porter a “bully” and a “liar,” and falsely implied that she’d 
recently accepted campaign contributions from major pharmaceutical and 
oil companies. Nothing in the ads disclosed Fairshake’s affiliation 
with Silicon Valley, its support of cryptocurrency, or its larger 
political aims. The negative campaign had a palpable effect: Porter, 
who had initially polled well, lost decisively in the primary, coming 
in third, with just fifteen per cent of the vote. But, according to a 
person familiar with Fairshake, the super PAC’s intent wasn’t simply to 
damage her. The group’s backers didn’t care all that much about Porter. 
Rather, the person familiar with Fairshake said, the goal of the attack 
campaign was to terrify other politicians—“to warn anyone running for 
office that, if you are anti-crypto, the industry will come after you.”

The super PAC and two affiliates soon revealed in federal filings that 
they had collected more than a hundred and seventy million dollars, 
which they could spend on political races across the nation in 2024, 
with more donations likely to come. That was more than nearly any other 
super PAC, including Preserve America, which supports Donald Trump, and 
WinSenate, which aims to help Democrats reclaim that chamber. Pro-
crypto donors are responsible for almost half of all corporate 
donations to PACs in the 2024 election cycle, and the tech industry has 
become one of the largest corporate donors in the nation. The point of 
all that money, like of the attack on Porter, has been to draw 
attention to Silicon Valley’s financial might—and to prove that its 
leaders are capable of political savagery in order to protect their 
interests. “It’s a simple message,” the person familiar with Fairshake 
said. “If you are pro-crypto, we will help you, and if you are anti we 
will tear you apart.”

After Porter’s defeat, it became obvious that the super PAC’s message 
had been received by politicians elsewhere. Candidates in New York, 
Arizona, Maryland, and Michigan began releasing crypto-friendly public 
statements and voting for pro-crypto bills. When Porter tried to 
explain to her three children why she had lost, part of the lesson 
focussed on the Realpolitik of wealth and elections. “When you have 
members who are afraid of ten million dollars being spent overnight 
against them, the will in Washington to do what’s right disappears 
pretty quickly,” she recalls saying. “This was naked political power 
designed to influence votes in Washington. And it worked.”

“And I’m saying you need to come look at this.”
Cartoon by Roland High
Copy link to cartoon
Link copied

Shop

Open cartoon gallery
Porter’s defeat, in fact, was the culmination of a strategy that had 
begun more than a decade earlier to turn Silicon Valley into the most 
powerful political operation in the nation. As the tech industry has 
become the planet’s dominant economic force, a coterie of 
specialists—led, in part, by the political operative who introduced the 
idea of “a vast right-wing conspiracy” decades ago—have taught Silicon 
Valley how to play the game of politics. Their aim is to help tech 
leaders become as powerful in Washington, D.C., and in state 
legislatures as they are on Wall Street. It is likely that in the 
coming decades these efforts will affect everything from Presidential 
races to which party controls Congress and how antitrust and artificial 
intelligence are regulated. Now that the tech industry has quietly 
become one of the most powerful lobbying forces in American politics, 
it is wielding that power as previous corporate special interests have: 
to bully, cajole, and remake the nation as it sees fit.

Chris Lehane was just shy of thirty years old when he came up with the 
notion of “a vast right-wing conspiracy,” to explain Republican efforts 
to undermine Bill and Hillary Clinton. It was such an inspired bit of 
showmanship that Hillary Clinton adopted it as one of her signature 
lines. At the time, Lehane was a lawyer in the Clinton White House 
tasked with defending the Administration from charges of scandal, but 
he specialized in seizing control of the political conversation, 
finding colorful ways to put Republicans on defense. Tactics such as 
declaring that the President of the United States was the victim of a 
shadowy conservative cabal were so effective that the Times later 
declared Lehane to be the modern-day “master of the political dark 
arts.”

After serving in the White House, Lehane joined Al Gore’s Presidential 
campaign, as press secretary, and after Gore’s defeat he set up shop in 
San Francisco. Despite the size and the electoral significance of 
California, many campaign operatives viewed the state as a political 
backwater, because it was so far away from Washington. But Lehane, who 
had worked on the Telecommunications Act of 1996, was convinced that 
Silicon Valley was the future, and he quickly built a business 
providing his dark arts to wealthy Californians. When trial lawyers 
wanted to increase the state’s caps on medical-malpractice jury awards, 
they brought in Lehane, who helped send voters flyers that looked like 
cadaver toe tags, and produced ads implying that doctors might be 
performing surgery while drunk. A few years later, when a prominent 
environmentalist hired Lehane to campaign against the Keystone XL 
Pipeline, he sent activists into press conferences carrying vials of 
sludge from an oil spill; the sludge was so noxious that reporters fled 
the room. Then he hired one of the Navy SEALs who had helped kill Osama 
bin Laden to talk to journalists and explain that if the pipeline were 
approved a terrorist attack could flood Nebraska with one of the 
largest oil spills in American history. Lehane explained to a reporter 
his theory of civil discourse: “Everyone has a game plan until you 
punch them in the mouth. So let’s punch them in the mouth.”

Video From The New Yorker

 


But Lehane’s efforts generally failed to impress the tech industry. For 
decades, Silicon Valley firms had considered themselves mostly detached 
from electoral politics. As one senior tech executive explained to me, 
until about the mid-twenty-tens, “if you were a V.C. or C.E.O. you 
might hire lobbyists to talk to politicians, or gossip with you, but, 
beyond that, most of the Valley thought politics was stupid.” Within a 
decade of Lehane’s move West, however, a new kind of tech company was 
emerging: so-called sharing-economy firms such as Uber, Airbnb, and 
TaskRabbit. These companies were “disrupting” long-established sectors, 
including transportation, hospitality, and contract labor. Politicians 
had long considered it their prerogative to regulate these sectors, 
and, as some of the startups’ valuations grew into the billions, 
politicians began making demands on them as well. They felt affronted 
by companies like Uber that were refusing to abide by even modest 
regulations. Other companies tried a more conciliatory approach, but 
quickly found themselves mired in local political infighting and 
municipal bureaucracies. In any case, “not understanding politics 
became an existential risk,” another senior tech executive said. “There 
was a general realization that we had to get involved in politics, 
whether we wanted to or not.”

In 2015, San Francisco itself became the site of a major regulation 
battle, in the form of Proposition F, a ballot initiative to limit 
short-term housing rentals, which both sides acknowledged was an attack 
on Airbnb. The proposal had emerged from built-up frustrations: some 
San Franciscans complained that many buildings had essentially become 
unlicensed hotels, hosting hard-partying tourists who never turned off 
the music, didn’t clean up their trash, and—most worrying for city 
leaders—hadn’t paid the taxes that the city would have collected had 
they stayed at a Marriott. Other residents argued that Airbnb’s 
presence was making it harder to find affordable housing, because it 
was more profitable to rent to short-term visitors than to long-term 
tenants. Proposition F would essentially make it impossible for Airbnb 
to work with many homeowners for more than a few weeks a year. Early 
polling indicated that the initiative was popular. Numerous other 
cities had been considering similar legislation, and were eagerly 
watching to see if lawmakers in San Francisco—where Airbnb was 
headquartered—could teach them how to rein in the Internet giant, then 
worth some twenty-five billion dollars.

Airbnb’s executives, panicked, called Lehane and asked him to come to 
their headquarters; he showed up within minutes of their call, in the 
sweatpants and baseball jersey that he’d been wearing at his son’s 
Little League game. Lehane has the lean build of someone accustomed to 
athletic self-torture—he runs daily, often fifteen miles at a stretch, 
typically while sending oddly punctuated e-mails and leaving stream-of-
consciousness voice mails—and he has a boyish crooked front tooth that 
offsets the effect of his receding hairline. To Airbnb’s leaders, he 
didn’t look like much of a political guru. But, once Lehane caught his 
breath, he launched into a commanding speech. You’re looking at this 
situation all wrong, he said. Proposition F wasn’t a crisis—it was an 
opportunity to change San Francisco’s political landscape, to upend a 
narrative. The key, he told executives, was to build a campaign against 
Proposition F as sophisticated as Barack Obama’s recent Presidential 
run, and to deploy insane amounts of money as a warning to politicians 
that an “Airbnb voter” existed—and ought not be crossed. He proposed a 
three-pronged strategy, and explained to executives that what 
politicians care about most is reëlection. If the company could show 
that being anti-Airbnb would make it harder for them to stay in office, 
they would fall in line. Lehane was soon named Airbnb’s head of global 
policy and public affairs.

His first step in this role was to mobilize Airbnb’s natural advocates: 
the homeowners who were profiting by renting out their properties, and 
the visitors who had avoided pricey hotel rooms by using the service. 
By the end of 2015, more than a hundred and thirty thousand people had 
rented or hosted rooms in San Francisco. Lehane recruited several 
former Obama-campaign staffers to lead teams who made tens of thousands 
of phone calls to Airbnb hosts and renters, warning them about 
Proposition F. The team members also urged hosts to attend town-hall 
meetings, talk to neighbors, and call local officials. During this 
period, the company—accidentally, it says—sent an e-mail to everyone 
who had ever stayed in a California Airbnb, urging them to contact the 
California legislature. The legislature was inundated with messages 
from around the world. The Senate president pro tem called Lehane to 
let him know that the message had been received, and to beg him to stop 
the onslaught. “I kind of wish we had done it on purpose,” someone 
close to that campaign told me.

The second part of Lehane’s strategy was to use large amounts of money 
to pressure San Francisco politicians. The company brought on hundreds 
of canvassers to knock on the doors of two hundred and eighty-five 
thousand people—roughly a third of the city’s population—and urge them 
to contact their local elected officials and say that opposing Airbnb 
was the equivalent of attacking innovation, economic independence, and 
America’s ideals. The relentless campaign posed a clear threat to the 
city’s Board of Supervisors: if an official supported Proposition F, 
Airbnb might encourage someone to run against him or her. “We said the 
quiet part out loud,” a campaign staffer said. “The goal was 
intimidation, to let everyone know that if they fuck with us they’ll 
regret it.” In all, Airbnb spent eight million dollars on the campaign, 
roughly ten times as much as all of Proposition F’s supporters 
combined. “It was the most ridiculous campaign I’ve ever worked on,” 
the staffer told me. “It was so over the top, so extreme. You shouldn’t 
be able to spend that much on a municipal election.” That said, the 
staffer loved her time at Airbnb: “It was the most money I’d ever 
earned working in politics.”

The third aspect of Lehane’s strategy was upending the debate over 
Proposition F by proposing alternative solutions. Otherwise, Lehane and 
Airbnb’s chief executive, Brian Chesky, believed, the company would 
face similar proposals in other cities. “You can’t just be against 
everything,” Lehane told the Airbnb board. “You have to be for 
something.” As a compromise gesture, Airbnb had voluntarily begun 
paying taxes on short-term stays within the city. It also offered to 
share some internal company data—such as the number of guests visiting 
the city each month—that would help local officials monitor the 
service’s impact on the community. What’s more, Airbnb eventually 
offered to build a Web interface that San Francisco officials could use 
to register hosts and track rental patterns. The solution was self-
serving, in that it made the city dependent on Airbnb for monitoring 
Airbnb’s activities. But the proposals addressed many of the complaints 
that had prompted Proposition F. More important, they guaranteed San 
Francisco tens of millions of tax dollars annually. When Proposition F 
finally came to a vote, it was resoundingly defeated.

Airbnb’s approach to political conflict was in stark contrast with that 
of Uber, which had just become the most valuable startup in the 
world—and which, owing to its resistance to various taxi regulations, 
was soon under fire from multiple cities and nations. Airbnb’s tactics 
were designed to appeal to politicians’ higher ideals. After the 
Proposition F campaign, Lehane began working on a partnership with the 
S.E.I.U., one of the nation’s largest labor unions, to unionize the 
workers who cleaned Airbnb rentals. The plan never came together, but 
labor-friendly politicians in San Francisco and New York began viewing 
Airbnb as a potential ally.

To other political operatives, Lehane’s tactics hardly seemed 
groundbreaking. But within Silicon Valley his approach was a 
revelation. “It was a huge bang for a relatively small outlay,” a tech 
executive told me. “It turns out the R.O.I.”—return on investment—“on 
politics is way better than anyone suspected.”

After the defeat of Proposition F, San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors 
eventually agreed to many of Airbnb’s suggestions. By then, Lehane had 
moved on to other locations. He began similar Airbnb campaigns in 
dozens of other cities, including Barcelona, Berlin, New York, and 
Mexico City. When the U.S. Conference of Mayors convened in Washington, 
D.C., in 2016, Lehane was invited to speak after Michelle Obama. “Read 
my lips,” he told the gathering. “We want to pay taxes.” Airbnb soon 
had agreements with more than a hundred cities, and when local 
politicians proved intransigent—leaders in Austin, for instance, seemed 
immune to Airbnb’s overtures—the company simply went over their heads. 
In Texas, it persuaded the state legislature to make it hard for any 
municipality to ban short-term rentals. Today, Airbnb has agreements 
with thousands of cities.

A few years after Lehane joined Airbnb, a venture capitalist pulled him 
aside at a party and said, “It used to be, hiring the right C.F.O. was 
the most important thing to make sure a company goes public. But you’ve 
proved a political person is just as important.” Lehane, however, had 
had an even bigger insight. These campaigns had revealed that tech 
companies—particularly firms, like Airbnb, with platforms that connect 
people who might otherwise have trouble finding one another—were now 
potentially the most powerful cohort in politics. “At one point, 
organizations like labor or political parties had the ability to 
organize and really turn out large numbers of voters,” Lehane told me. 
Today, Internet platforms have the bigger reach; a tech company can 
communicate with hundreds of millions of people by pushing a button. 
“If Airbnb can engage fifteen thousand hosts in a city, that can have 
an impact on who wins a city-council race or the mayoralty,” Lehane 
told me. “In a congressional or Senate race, fifty thousand votes can 
make all the difference.” Of course, simply having a huge user base 
doesn’t guarantee that Airbnb can get everything it wants. Voters 
respond only to enticements that they find persuasive. But companies 
like Airbnb, Lehane understood, could make arguments faster, and more 
efficiently, than nearly any political party or other special-interest 
group, and this was a source of considerable power. “The platforms are 
really the only ones who can speak to everyone now,” Lehane said.

For the tech industry, the Trump years were a bewildering mess. The 
President attacked tech platforms for being biased against 
conservatives, and liberals railed against Silicon Valley’s social-
media companies for propelling Trump into the White House. Tech 
executives declared their support for the industry’s many immigrants in 
the face of Trump’s Muslim ban and border separations; they also 
contended with walkouts and protests from employees over racial 
injustice, sexual harassment, and all-gender bathrooms—subjects that 
neither an engineering degree nor business school had prepared them 
for. When Joe Biden won the Presidency, in 2020, the Valley’s leaders 
were relieved. The Biden Administration seemed like a return to the Pax 
Obama, an era when tech was considered cool and politicians boasted of 
knowing Mark Zuckerberg. Biden’s victory also meant that Lehane, with 
his deep roots in the Democratic Party, was unquestionably Silicon 
Valley’s top political guru. Companies sought him out; employees loved 
that he was generous with credit and made politics fun. (Many former 
colleagues talk proudly about the nicknames that he bestowed upon 
them.) Most of all, he made the people he worked with feel like they 
were on a righteous quest. Peter Ragone, a prominent adviser to 
numerous Democratic politicians, told me that, among the handful of 
political consultants transforming Silicon Valley, “Chris is the tip of 
the spear. His capacity for processing information at speed is 
breathtaking.”

The Valley’s enthusiasm for Biden, however, was short-lived. The 
President quickly appointed three prominent tech skeptics—Gary Gensler, 
Lina Khan, and Jonathan Kanter—to oversee the Securities and Exchange 
Commission, the Federal Trade Commission, and the antitrust division of 
the Department of Justice, respectively. Soon the government was suing 
or investigating Google, Apple, Amazon, Meta, Tesla, and dozens of 
other companies. Some of those suits and inquiries had been initiated 
under Trump, but Biden’s S.E.C. found a particular target in the 
cryptocurrency industry. Gensler, an ally of Elizabeth Warren, filed 
more than eighty legal actions arguing that crypto firms or promoters 
had violated the law, most often by selling unregistered securities. 
Some of the executives being sued by the S.E.C. had contributed 
lavishly to the Democrats. Brad Garlinghouse, the C.E.O. of the crypto 
firm Ripple, who had been a fund-raising bundler for Obama, was among 
those under legal fire, and he clearly felt victimized. He told 
Bloomberg that the federal government was acting like “a bully,” and 
tweeted, “Dems continue to enable Gensler’s unlawful war on 
crypto—sabotaging the ability for American innovation to thrive. It’s 
no wonder the GOP has announced a pro-crypto stance . . . . Voters are 
paying attention.” (Last year, a federal judge upheld some portions of 
the S.E.C.’s case against Ripple and dismissed others.)

To certain people, the government’s approach felt oddly aggressive. One 
crypto executive told me she discovered that her bank accounts had been 
frozen—with no explanation—only when she tried to make a withdrawal to 
repair a catastrophic home-septic-system failure. Around this time, 
various regulatory agencies were warning banks about the risks posed by 
the crypto industry. When the executive’s accounts were later 
unfrozen—again, without a clear explanation—she was left wondering if 
the government’s goal was to intimidate the industry. (The Office of 
the Comptroller of the Currency, which regulates national banks, said 
that it does not direct banks to freeze individual accounts.)

Cartoon by Michael Maslin
Copy link to cartoon
Link copied

Shop

Open cartoon gallery
The Biden Administration’s oppositional stance, however, seemed 
warranted when, in 2022, FTX—the enormous crypto exchange and hedge 
fund led by Sam Bankman-Fried—imploded amid revelations that more than 
eight billion dollars had been misallocated or lost. Bankman-Fried had 
been a prolific political donor, and violating campaign-finance law was 
among the crimes for which he was arrested. Another crypto executive 
told me that, after the FTX scandal, many figures in the industry “just 
wanted to put our heads down and disappear,” adding, “The less people 
noticed us, the better.”

But among Silicon Valley’s most moneyed class retreat wasn’t an option. 
The powerful venture-capital firm Andreessen Horowitz had already 
raised more than seven billion dollars for crypto and blockchain 
investments. The “super angel” investor Ron Conway had poured millions 
of dollars into crypto firms through his venture fund. Lehane urged 
some of the largest crypto investors and companies, many of whom were 
bickering on Twitter, to instead form a coalition devoted to changing 
the public narrative. He began hosting private biweekly gatherings, 
known as the Ad-Hoc Group, where various collaborations were discussed. 
Eventually, a former partner at Andreessen Horowitz, Katie Haun, 
recommended that the large crypto firm Coinbase, where she was a board 
member, bring on Lehane as an adviser.

Lehane met with Coinbase’s co-founder Brian Armstrong and told him 
that, just as with Airbnb, what seemed like a crisis was actually an 
opportunity. “This is not the time to go quiet,” Lehane told him. “This 
is your chance to define your company and the industry, and prove 
you’re different from FTX.” In 2023, Lehane joined Coinbase’s Global 
Advisory Council. Twenty-five days later, the S.E.C. sued the firm.

Lehane established a war room with the primary goal of convincing 
politicians that the political consequences of being anti-crypto would 
be intensely painful. The person familiar with Fairshake, who was then 
an employee at Coinbase, told me, “It wasn’t really about explaining 
how crypto works, or anything like that. It’s about hitting politicians 
where they are most sensitive—reëlection.” Armstrong clarified this aim 
at a crypto conference in 2023. The goal, he said, was to ask 
candidates, “Are you with us? Are you against us? Are we going to be 
running ads for you or against you?”

Although Lehane’s basic strategy resembled the one he’d used at Airbnb, 
that campaign had been focussed on municipal issues and local political 
races. The crypto effort was national in scale, targeting Senate and 
House races—and potentially even the Presidential contest—and would 
require significantly more money. Lehane suggested to Armstrong that 
crypto firms set aside fifty million dollars for outreach. Let’s 
earmark a hundred million, Armstrong replied. Coinbase, Ripple, and 
Andreessen Horowitz donated more than a hundred and forty million 
dollars to Fairshake, the crypto super pac. Executives at other firms 
contributed millions more.

Lehane, collaborating closely with Fairshake, began crafting a pro-
crypto message and helping to build a “grassroots” army. “We need to 
demonstrate there’s a crypto voter,” he told the Coinbase team. 
“There’s millions and millions of Americans who own this stuff. We need 
to prove they’ll vote to protect it.”

The Federal Reserve has said that in 2023 fewer than twenty million 
Americans owned cryptocurrencies. Polling indicates that the issue is 
not an electoral priority for many voters. One Coinbase staff member 
pointed out this discrepancy to Lehane, saying, “I don’t know if there 
is a crypto voter.”

“Then we’re going to make one,” Lehane replied.

Coinbase began loudly promoting the results of surveys reporting to 
show that fifty-two million Americans owned cryptocurrencies, and that 
many of them intended to vote to protect their digital pocketbooks. 
Those polls indicated that sixty per cent of crypto owners were 
millennials or Gen Z-ers, and forty-one per cent were people of 
color—demographics that each party was trying to woo. Lehane also 
quietly helped launch an advocacy organization, Stand with Crypto, 
which is advertised to Coinbase’s millions of U.S. customers every time 
they log in, and which urges cryptocurrency owners to contact their 
lawmakers and sign petitions. The group says that it currently has more 
than a million members. The Coinbase employee told me that Stand with 
Crypto would identify a city with a significant population of crypto 
enthusiasts, like Columbus, Ohio, and then inundate them with push 
notifications aimed at organizing town halls and rallies. The employee 
explained, “If you can get fifty or sixty people to show up, with good 
photo angles you can make it look like hundreds. In small states or 
close elections, that’s enough to convince a candidate they should be 
paranoid.”

This supposed army of crypto voters fed directly into the next stage of 
the assault: scaring politicians. Stand with Crypto built an online 
dashboard that assigned grades to U.S. senators and representatives—and 
to many of their challengers—which reflected their support for crypto. 
The scores seemed to inevitably be either “A (Strongly supports 
crypto)” or “F (Strongly against crypto),” though the data undergirding 
the grades were sometimes specious. “Most of them hadn’t really taken a 
side,” another Coinbase staffer told me. “So we’d, you know, look at 
speeches they’d given, or who they were friends with, and kind of make 
a guess. If you were friends with Elizabeth Warren, you were more 
likely to get an F.”

Nevertheless, Lehane insisted that Fairshake maintain a nonpartisan 
tone. The super PAC was careful to support an equal number of 
Democratic and Republican candidates, and, following Lehane’s advice, 
it planned to stay out of the 2024 Presidential race altogether. A 
venture capitalist who has advised the crypto industry told me that the 
group’s nonpartisan stance was essential, because, “if we want to get 
the right regulations in place, we have to get a bill through Congress, 
which means we need votes from both parties.” Moreover, Fairshake’s 
goal was to “create a nonpartisan cost for being negative on crypto and 
tech,” the venture capitalist added. “People need to know there are 
consequences.”

To make this point, Lehane and Fairshake wanted to find a contest in 
which the group’s spending was certain to attract national attention. 
Fairshake compiled a list of high-profile races, and near the top was 
the fight to replace Dianne Feinstein in California. The obvious target 
was Porter, whose strongest opponent in the Democratic primary was 
Representative Adam Schiff. California was reliably blue, and so, if 
Fairshake helped defeat Porter, the group wouldn’t get blamed for 
handing a seat to the Republicans. What’s more, California’s primary 
occurred on March 5th—early in the campaign season—which meant that 
Porter’s race would get lots of attention and Fairshake would have time 
to broadcast its involvement and petrify candidates in other states. 
Because Porter was friendly with Elizabeth Warren, she could be 
painted—fairly or not—as anti-crypto. Best of all, many polls indicated 
that Porter was unlikely to win the primary anyway, so if the super PAC 
“went in with a big spend, and made a big splash and she lost, 
Fairshake could take the victory lap regardless of whether it tipped 
the scales,” the Coinbase employee said. The calculation was prescient: 
Fairshake’s spending helped doom Porter in the primary, and the general 
election appears to be a lock for Schiff (who got an A from Stand with 
Crypto). As another political operative put it, “Porter was a perfect 
choice because she let crypto declare, ‘If you are even slightly 
critical of us, we won’t just kill you—we’ll kill your fucking family, 
we’ll end your career.’ From a political perspective, it was a 
masterpiece.” Porter will be out of government at the end of this year.

After Porter’s defeat, many politicians who had once treated crypto 
with disdain or hostility suddenly became fans. In May, two months 
after Porter’s defenestration, a pro-crypto bill came up for a vote in 
the House. In previous years, similar bills had languished amid tepid 
Republican support and strong Democratic opposition. The new bill—known 
as the Financial Innovation and Technology for the 21st Century Act—was 
openly opposed by President Biden. But it sailed through the House, 
with nearly unanimous Republican backing and seventy-one votes from 
Democrats. The Senate Majority Leader, Chuck Schumer, recently joined a 
Crypto4Harris virtual town hall and promised that passing the 
legislation this year is “absolutely possible,” adding, “Crypto is here 
to stay.” The Democratic senator Sherrod Brown—a longtime crypto 
critic—is running for reëlection in Ohio, where Fairshake has directed 
forty million dollars to ads in support of his opponent; Brown has 
lately been tempering his public criticisms of the industry. Earlier 
this year, crypto donors indicated that they might get involved in 
Montana’s Senate race, where the incumbent Democrat, Jon Tester, once a 
crypto skeptic, is facing a difficult fight. Soon afterward, Tester 
voted to weaken S.E.C. oversight of cryptocurrencies, earning him the 
unusual grade of “C (Neutral on crypto).” It looks like Fairshake will 
stay out of Montana as long as Tester keeps voting the right way. A 
similar dynamic occurred in Maryland: after the super PAC threatened to 
take sides in the Democratic Senate primary there, both major 
candidates proclaimed their pro-crypto bona fides.

In total, Fairshake and affiliated super PACs have already spent more 
than a hundred million dollars on political races in 2024, including 
forty-three million on Senate races in Ohio and West Virginia, and 
seven million on four congressional races, in North Carolina, Colorado, 
Alaska, and Iowa. Three and half million dollars was used to help 
vanquish two left-wing representatives who were members of the so-
called Squad: Jamaal Bowman, of New York, and Cori Bush, of Missouri. 
Of the forty-two primaries that Fairshake has been involved in this 
year, its preferred candidate has won eighty-five per cent of the time. 
The super PAC’s latest filings indicated that it had more than seventy 
million dollars to spend in the remainder of the election cycle. Its 
donations to political candidates are on par with those of the oil-and-
gas industry, the pharmaceutical industry, and labor unions.

Just as Airbnb sought to change the conversation around Proposition F 
by proposing various concessions—paying taxes and sharing data—the 
crypto industry has become a vocal proponent of a seemingly solutions-
oriented fix: new regulations for cryptocurrencies and the blockchain. 
Critics, however, say that these proposals are self-serving. A central 
dispute between the crypto industry and regulators concerns whether 
cryptocurrencies are securities—akin to, say, a share of Apple, the 
sale of which is governed by strict investor-protection laws—or 
commodities, like a bushel of corn, which can be sold with very little 
government involvement. Most fiat currencies—that is, those issued by 
governments—are used primarily to buy such things as food and clothing, 
rather than to gamble on the rise and fall of exchange rates. 
Cryptocurrencies, in contrast, are often difficult—or, in some cases, 
impossible—to use for purchasing physical goods, and they are 
frequently held by speculators solely as a wager that their value will 
rise. There are several thousand cryptocurrencies in existence. A 
few—most notably, Bitcoin and Ether—are considered commodities. The 
statuses of most of the rest are up for debate.

“Now, to demonstrate that he has come of age, Jeffrey will open a 
childproof bottle of acetaminophen in front of all his friends and 
family.”
Cartoon by Patrick McKelvie
Copy link to cartoon
Link copied

Shop

Open cartoon gallery
Many within the industry want Congress to pass regulations that would 
treat mainstream cryptocurrencies as commodities, which are overseen by 
the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, a relatively sleepy agency 
that most people have never heard of—and that tends to be less 
belligerent than the S.E.C. If the C.F.T.C. becomes the primary 
regulatory body for crypto, it’s likely that the stream of lawsuits and 
fines against large crypto companies will slow or cease. More 
important, selling Dogecoin (the cryptocurrency associated with a Shiba 
Inu dog), Dentacoin (“the only cryptocurrency by dentists, for 
dentists”), or CumRocket (cryptocurrency for the pornography 
aficionado) would become significantly less risky, and more profitable.

People in the government think that this would be disastrous. “A lot of 
these tokens, frankly, have no real utility, no actual use, and they’re 
just for gambling or scamming people,” an official familiar with the 
S.E.C.’s thinking told me. “We already have regulations in place that 
have protected investors in these kinds of situations for decades. 
Crypto just doesn’t want to abide by them. If your entire business plan 
is asking ‘Can we get Kim Kardashian to tweet about us?’ and then 
taking people’s money, the government needs to be involved.”

In fact, convincing average Americans that the crypto industry is a 
wholesome, customer-friendly place has been a tough sell: polls 
indicate that most people do not consider the crypto sector to be safe. 
Lehane’s colleagues within the industry have therefore shifted their 
tactics slightly. Getting Congress to pass friendly legislation is 
still a priority, but this push is now being presented as being in 
service of much loftier aims: protecting innovation, 
entrepreneurialism, and America’s future.

In July, Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, of the Andreessen Horowitz 
venture fund, made a ninety-one-minute video accusing President Biden 
of weakening America. Andreessen said to Horowitz, “There’s been a 
brutal assault on a nascent industry that I’ve just—I’ve never 
experienced before. I’m in total shock that it has happened.” Horowitz 
replied, “They’ve basically subverted the rule of law to attack the 
crypto industry.” These and other government actions, they said, 
threatened to doom America’s economy, technological superiority, and 
military might. And Biden, by refusing to embrace various tech-industry 
proposals, was allowing China to leap ahead. “The future of technology, 
and the future of America, is at stake,” Horowitz declared. The two men 
were so concerned, they said, that they had no choice but to endorse 
Donald Trump in 2024. (They also noted that, under Biden, billionaires 
like themselves might have to pay more in taxes. But that issue 
received less airtime.)

To people inside the crypto industry, the video—which received a huge 
amount of attention, prompting online co-signs from Elon Musk and 
various other titans—was a masterstroke. As the Coinbase employee put 
it, “Now you’ve got Andreessen and Musk and all these other rich, 
powerful guys saying that crypto is part of a bigger debate. It’s about 
an attack on American innovation and progress and the future of the 
country! It changed the conversation from ‘Is cryptocurrency a scam?’ 
to ‘Does Biden even care about middle-class entrepreneurs?’ ”

Even though Lehane opposes Trump’s candidacy, and had nothing to do 
with the video, Andreessen and Horowitz’s move was right out of the 
Lehane playbook. Lehane had done such a good job teaching the Valley 
how to play politics that others could now mimic his gambits. In July, 
Lehane joined Coinbase’s board of directors. “Chris is a genius,” the 
Coinbase employee said. “I don’t know how he comes up with this stuff, 
but he can change reality. He makes magic happen.”

The annual conference for Bitcoin enthusiasts isn’t an event at which 
politicians usually appear. The affair often draws more than twenty-
five thousand people, many of them distrustful of government. Wandering 
around the sea of booths, you can get a free vodka shot at 10 a.m. or 
discuss “tax-avoidance strategies” that fall somewhere between fraud 
and fantasy. People sell Edward Snowden T-shirts and crypto-themed 
board games. It’s a safe haven for enthusiasts of Panties for Bitcoin. 
But when the event took place in Nashville, in July—at a venue just a 
few blocks from the Redneck Riviera bar, where women were offering to 
lift their shirts in exchange for some of “that bit stuff”—it was 
teeming with political luminaries. There were eight senators, nearly a 
dozen representatives, and countless candidates for national and state 
office, some of whom launched into impromptu speeches whenever the 
techno music paused. The star attraction, however, was Donald Trump.

The event’s appearance on the Presidential campaign circuit—and Trump’s 
willingness to spend one of his campaign days in a state he’s 
guaranteed to win—confirmed that the crypto campaign initiated by 
Lehane was having an effect. When Trump gave a speech before a 
standing-room-only crowd in orange wigs and “Make Bitcoin Great Again” 
hats, he pledged, “On Day One, I will fire Gary Gensler”—the S.E.C. 
head. This prompted a standing ovation and choruses of pro-Trump 
chants. A man standing near me FaceTimed his wife and insisted that she 
watch the speech, even though she was in the delivery room where their 
grandchild was being born.

Trump’s embrace of crypto was a hundred-and-eighty-degree turn. As 
President, he had tweeted that he was “not a fan” of cryptocurrencies, 
which “are not money” and “can facilitate unlawful behavior, including 
drug trade and other illegal activity.” He continued, “We have only one 
real currency in the USA. It is called the United States Dollar!” 
Later, he said that Bitcoin “just seems like a scam.” But after leaving 
office Trump began seeking out new revenue sources, such as selling 
non-fungible tokens—a type of digital content hosted on the blockchain. 
This earned him a reported $7.2 million in 2023. Trump was convinced. 
His current Presidential campaign was among the first to accept 
cryptocurrency donations. He recently announced that—presumably in 
exchange for compensation—he’d become the “chief crypto advocate” for 
World Liberty Financial, a company led, in part, by an entrepreneur 
who’d reportedly sold marijuana and weight-loss products. Before Trump 
took the stage in Nashville, he hosted a “roundtable” fund-raiser with 
crypto investors, many of whom paid more than eight hundred thousand 
dollars to attend. Conference organizers have said that Trump raised 
twenty-five million dollars there.

When Trump spoke at the conference, it was clear that he had been, in 
the parlance of Bitcoin fans, “orange-pilled.” He promised that, if 
elected, he would direct the federal government to hold billions of 
dollars’ worth of cryptocurrency reserves. The U.S., he proclaimed, 
would become the “crypto capital of the planet and the Bitcoin 
superpower of the world!” Trump began echoing the crypto campaign’s 
talking points. “If we don’t do it, China is going to be doing it!” he 
said.

You might think Trump’s newfound veneration of Bitcoin would have 
delighted Lehane. It didn’t. Rather, it suggested that his campaign 
might be working a bit too well. As with Airbnb, Lehane doesn’t want 
the crypto industry to become firmly associated with either Democrats 
or Republicans, because then it will be impossible to pass legislation 
around it. And virtually any policy championed by Trump becomes a 
partisan matter by default.

President Biden’s announcement, in July, that he was dropping out of 
the race seemed to offer the crypto industry an opportunity for a reset 
with the Democrats. The ascension of Vice-President Kamala Harris, a 
Californian with a tech-friendly record, raised the possibility of 
balancing the partisan scales. In a September speech about her economic 
plans as President, Harris pledged that the U.S. would “remain dominant 
in A.I. and quantum computing, blockchain, and other emerging 
technologies.” The détente seems to be working: on October 4th, Ben 
Horowitz, the venture capitalist who had appeared in the video 
attacking Biden, told his employees that he and his wife would be 
making a personal donation to “entities who support the Harris Walz 
campaign”—in no small part because some private conservations he’d had 
with Harris and her team made him “very hopeful” that, as President, 
she’d abandon Biden’s “exceptionally destructive” crypto policies. 
Lehane, for his part, has donated thirty-five thousand dollars to 
Harris’s campaign (and nothing to Trump’s).

In the meantime, however, the crypto coalition that Lehane helped to 
build has begun fraying—a victim of the same partisan divides that 
plague the rest of the nation. In August, Ron Conway, the California 
power broker who had given half a million dollars to Fairshake, e-
mailed the super PAC’s other funders, including Andreessen and 
Armstrong, to complain that the campaign was alienating Democratic 
lawmakers. “How short sighted and stupid can you possibly be,” he 
wrote. Fairshake’s donations to unseat Senator Brown in Ohio were, 
Conway said, a “slap in the face” to Schumer. “NOT ONE PERSON BOTHERED 
TO GIVE ME A HEADS UP THAT YOU WERE DOINIG THIS,” he continued, proving 
that billionaires also ignore spell-check. “We have two factions: a 
moderate faction and a Donald Trump faction (Brian and Marc). . . . I 
have been working too long with people who [do] not share common values 
and that is unacceptable.” He went on, “Because of your selfish hidden 
agendas it is time for us to separate. . . . I will I no longer 
compromise myself by associating or helping.”

Republican leaders began making parallel complaints. When Andreessen 
and crypto executives joined a Republican congressional retreat in 
Jackson Hole this past summer, attendees expressed fury over the fact 
that Fairshake had spent money on ads supporting the Democratic 
candidates in the Arizona and Michigan Senate races—contests that might 
well decide which party takes control of the chamber.

Whether or not Lehane’s coalition holds together, one thing is clear: 
Silicon Valley has become part of a tradition that stretches back to 
Boss Tweed. Tech has learned how to politick. To paraphrase Ronald 
Reagan, the industry is mastering the world’s second-oldest profession 
by studying the techniques of the first. Tech’s money and emerging 
political savvy mean that its interests—crypto, the sharing economy, 
ungoverned social media—are here to stay. For the S.E.C., Silicon 
Valley’s turn has sparked something close to terror. “If crypto wins, 
you’re going to see financial firms suddenly saying their products are 
on the blockchain, and they’ll drive billions through that loophole,” 
the official familiar with the S.E.C.’s thinking told me. “We saw this 
happen with savings and loans, and with mortgage derivatives, and with 
regional banks, and it always ends badly. Something’s going to blow up, 
and a lot of people are going to get hurt.” Even the people who have 
worked on Lehane’s campaign aren’t certain that they’re doing the right 
thing. “Yeah, the Valley is more sophisticated now, but that doesn’t 
mean it’s good for the public,” the Coinbase staffer told me. “The 
public gives zero shits if crypto is a security or a commodity. What’s 
really important to them—How do I protect myself? How do I know which 
coin is safe?—that’s not part of the conversation. This isn’t 
enlightened debate and discussion. This is about using money to be a 
bully, so everyone knows you’re the scariest ones on the playground.”

There are two ways of looking at Silicon Valley’s new political 
sophistication. The first is that it is a manifestation of how a modern 
democracy is supposed to work. As Peter Ragone, the prominent Democrat 
consultant, put it, “I’d rather have people getting involved and 
getting their hands dirty—being willing to talk about regulation and 
saying their opinions in public—than a situation like the past, where 
all the rich guys cut deals in back rooms.” Many of America’s proudest 
political battles—the fights for marriage equality, universal suffrage, 
environmental protections—succeeded only because they were backed by 
supporters with deep pockets and fierce tenacity, advantages that the 
tech industry also has. And no amount of money can decide an election 
unless the voters agree with the agenda. “You don’t get to take office 
unless you have a majority, or close to a majority, of people agreeing 
with you, no matter how rich you are,” Ragone said. In this view, tech-
industry proponents, like many Americans, have simply learned to 
advocate for a cause, build a coalition, and make sure that their 
voices are heard.

The other way of viewing the Valley’s political exertions is as a 
symptom of systemic rot—as proof that American governance and 
legislation have become so perverted by money that it is nearly 
impossible for people other than billionaires to further their agendas. 
This dynamic can be seen as particularly dangerous given that the U.S. 
economy has dumped lavish riches on a tiny group of disaffected, 
defiantly unaccountable technologists. As many critics of Silicon 
Valley see it, today’s startup founders and venture capitalists are, 
like the nouveaux riches of previous eras, using their wealth for 
selfish aims. In doing so, they have revealed themselves to be as 
ruthless as the robber barons and industrial tyrants of a century 
ago—not coincidentally, the last time that income inequality was as 
extreme as it is today.

Cartoon by Seth Fleishman
Copy link to cartoon
Link copied

Shop

Open cartoon gallery
Lehane, for his part, acknowledges that our political system is flawed, 
but he believes he’s making it better. He’s been successful, he told 
me, only because he’s worked with so many talented colleagues devoted 
to building a better, fairer world. “For me, it’s always been about 
‘Can you give the little guy a much bigger knife to cut a much bigger 
piece of the economic pie?’ ” he said. As he sees it, Airbnb fought 
large hotel chains so that teachers and nurses could earn extra money 
by renting out their empty bedrooms. Coinbase has given people a way to 
sidestep the big banks and their onerous fees. Many entrenched 
industries have used politics to benefit themselves at the public’s 
cost. It’s only fair, Lehane argues, to let Internet upstarts fight for 
their agenda; he says his advocacy is rooted in a passionate belief 
that tech, if regulated wisely, can help the powerless get their share.

Of course, this mission has also made Lehane very wealthy. (He declined 
to disclose precisely how wealthy.) “But, at the risk of being 
incredibly hubristic, there’s a lot of places I could have gone to make 
money,” he said. What motivates him, he added, is a righteous battle. 
His X profile features a photograph of him in boxing gloves, grimacing 
mid-punch.

In August, OpenAI, the artificial-intelligence giant, announced that it 
had hired Lehane as its vice-president of global affairs. Unlike the 
battles that he’s fought at Airbnb and Coinbase, where the ideological 
lines of combat have been easy to define, the political fights over 
artificial intelligence are murkier and more nascent. There are 
numerous stakeholders with competing interests within the tech industry 
itself. Marc Andreessen, for one, has called for little to no 
additional regulation of underlying A.I. technologies, because, he 
wrote in a jeremiad last year, hampering the development of technology 
that might benefit humanity “is a form of murder.” In other words, “any 
deceleration of AI will cost lives.” He left it unsaid that creating 
regulations would also likely make it more difficult for him and other 
venture capitalists to find fast-growing companies to invest in, 
thereby denying them profits.

On the opposing side is a contingent of A.I. engineers who believe that 
their creations may soon become powerful enough to exterminate most of 
humanity. Regulation, therefore, is urgently needed to insure that only 
the most enlightened technologists can practice this mysterious 
alchemy. The technologists pushing these arguments, inevitably, place 
themselves among those enlightened few, and their “more responsible” 
visions of A.I. development often align with the business plans of 
their own startups.

Somewhere in the middle is Lehane and OpenAI. The company made an 
opening salvo in July, when its chief executive, Sam Altman, published, 
with Lehane’s support, an op-ed in the Washington Post which portrayed 
the fight around A.I. regulations as one pitting democracies against 
authoritarian regimes. “The bottom line is that democratic AI has a 
lead over authoritarian AI because our political system has empowered 
U.S. companies, entrepreneurs, and academics,” Altman wrote. But that 
lead is not guaranteed, he continued, and it can be protected only if 
Congress passes regulations that encourage important software 
advances—like OpenAI’s ChatGPT chatbot—and also prioritize “rules of 
the road” and “norms in developing and deploying AI.” OpenAI, Altman 
indicated, is prepared to accept substantial constraints on data 
security and transparency, and it supports the creation of a government 
agency to regulate A.I. development and use.

This rhetoric may sound high-minded, but—not surprisingly—Altman’s 
position is also somewhat self-interested. The company’s smaller rivals 
would probably find such rules and norms expensive and cumbersome, and 
therefore have a harder time complying with them than OpenAI would. The 
op-ed was also an example of Lehanian reframing: instead of talking 
about big A.I. companies competing with small startups, or about the 
inevitable tensions between rapid technological leaps and slower but 
safer progress, Altman recast the A.I. battle as one between good and 
evil. And Silicon Valley, in this story line, is the home of virtuous 
superheroes.

Some observers of the A.I. industry find this perspective cynical. 
Suresh Venkatasubramanian, a professor of computer science at Brown, is 
a co-author of the White House’s “Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights,” 
which urges regulations on data privacy and transparency, and 
protections against algorithmic discrimination. He told me, “You notice 
OpenAI doesn’t want to talk about its alleged theft of copyrighted 
materials, which is definitely anti-democratic and, if true, definitely 
anti-American.” (ChatGPT was developed by inhaling texts from the 
Internet without paying—or, for the most part, crediting—their authors; 
OpenAI claims that this is fair use.) What’s more, Altman’s reframing 
elides important issues that democratic nations might disagree on, such 
as what kinds of privacy regulations ought to govern A.I., and who 
should pay for the environmental costs of A.I. data centers.

But Lehane’s strategy of putting Altman forward as a strong political 
voice guarantees that OpenAI, and the A.I. industry as a whole, will 
continue to influence the American political conversation for years to 
come. Venkatasubramanian told me, “The goal is to get a seat at the 
table, because then you have influence over how things turn out.” The 
A.I. industry’s influence is already being felt in state capitals. 
Workday, a giant human-resources software company, has been lobbying in 
several states to add what could be a subtle loophole to legislation 
about “automated decision tools” in the workplace. Companies that, like 
Workday, sell A.I.-enhanced software for hiring employees would 
essentially be immune from lawsuits over racial discrimination, or 
other biases, unless a litigant could prove that A.I. was the 
“controlling” factor behind the rejection of a candidate. “It all comes 
down to just one word in the legislation,” Venkatasubramanian said. 
“One word makes all the difference, and if you are at the table, and 
involved in the conversation, you can nudge that word into the 
legislation, or out of it.”

Even Lehane admits that the A.I. campaign is in its early stages. The 
exact pressure points aren’t quite clear yet. Alliances and enmities 
are constantly shifting. What is certain, though, is that Silicon 
Valley will continue to bully and woo politicians by deploying 
money—and its giant user base—as a lure and a weapon.

Things could change: the robber barons of the Gilded Age were 
eventually brought down; twentieth-century industrial tyrants were, 
over time, shamed into retreat. The most well-known tech 
companies—Google, Apple, Meta, and Amazon—have become bêtes noires to 
people on both the right and the left. (So far, though, this seemingly 
hasn’t done much to harm profits, or to cow executives.) Democracy, in 
all its mess and glory, may prevail. The only fixed truth about 
technology is that change is inevitable. Most of the tech industry “has 
run independent of politics for our entire careers,” Andreessen wrote 
when he announced that his political neutrality was over. Going 
forward, he would be working against candidates who defied tech. As 
Andreessen saw it, he didn’t have a choice: “As the old Soviet joke 
goes, ‘You may not be interested in politics, but politics is 
interested in you.’ ” ?

Published in the print edition of the October 14, 2024, issue, with the 
headline “Silicon Valley’s Influence Game.”

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/10/14/silicon-valley-the-new-
lobbying-monster