Chamath Palihapitiya, founder of venture capital firm Social Capital, speaks at the Vanity Fair New Institutions Summit at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts on Oct. 19, 2016 in San Francisco, Calif.
A wealthy group of senior investors and tech executives have joined the effort to oust incumbent Gavin Newsom after Chamath Palihapitiya, a billionaire and prominent investor, announced this week that he will run for governor of California.
The billionaire, tech investor Palihapitiya, a longtime Democratic donor who was born in Sri Lanka and served as an executive at Facebook in its early days, getting it to 500 million users in 2010, left the company in 2011 to start Social Capital, a venture capital firm.
Palihapitiya tweeted on Tuesday (Jan. 26), “Here goes. #RemoveGavinNewsom.” and included his campaign website at the end of the post. According to the website description, “California is a mess right now – it’s too expensive, our teachers are underpaid, and our schools aren’t good enough.”
On his campaign website, Palihapitiya proposes a series of promises, including cutting taxes to zero, giving teachers a $70,000 minimum wage, ending student loans and giving $2,000 in handouts for every newborn child in California.
As of Jan. 23, the recall petition for Newsom had collected more than 1.2 million signatures, three quarters of the threshold, which could make Newsom one of the few governors in California history to have a successful recall process initiated. Of interest is that the countersignatures also include wealthy Silicon Valley voters who previously supported Newsom.
David Sacks, founder of the Craft Ventures fund, had donated $60,000 to Newsom’s campaign in 2018. But he came out in support of Palihapitiya on Tuesday, who Sacks called a centrist Democrat, telling Bloomberg that Newsom is “now completely beholden to special interests.”
Meanwhile, former San Diego Republican Mayor Kevin Faulconer is also considering a run. Faulconer signed on to the recall campaign in early 2021 and said on Facebook, “It’s Time to start holding the governor accountable.”
Anne Hyde Dunsmore, manager of the recall campaign, told The Epoch Times that Newsom lifted the draconian Home rule order on Monday (Jan. 25) in an attempt to “maintain the hold he still has on state government.” She said, “He knows he’s in trouble. It was a reckless choice that he made on his own instincts, and now he will be criticized for it.”
According to state records, the recall campaign recently received a number of donations from Silicon Valley, with Patricia Perkins-Leone, the wife of a Sequoia Capital partner, donating $99,800; Dixon Doll, founder of Doll Capital Management, donating $99,800. Dixon Doll and his wife, Carol Doll, gave nearly $192,000.
Other large donors include Prov.3:9 LLC, construction company owners Susan and Howard Groff, and the California Recovery Political Action Committee.
Newsom himself seemed unconcerned, however, and when asked about the dismissals by the media at the conference, he replied that they were “complete nonsense. Officials claimed that California lifted the order because outbreak indicators and forecasts showed a continued decline in positive cases.
Newsom’s spokesman said the recall campaign was a waste of money and that the governor “would rather focus on getting through the final stages of the outbreak.
According to the California Secretary of State’s website, citizens have initiated seven recall actions against Newsom in his less than two years as governor. The first six were unsuccessful for reasons such as lack of signatures, but each time they failed, another recall campaign followed. The recall campaign has the financial backing of Republican Rep. Darrell Issa, who last month warned Newsom to take the current recall campaign seriously.
When news broke that Newsom had violated his own Epidemic prevention order last year by asking people to stay home while going to fancy restaurants and sitting around several people without masks, the number of signatures in support of his recall jumped by 400,000 in a short time, although he has since apologized, according to data.
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