Who is Michael Moritz, and what does he want for San Francisco?
Doctors told the billionaire donor he should be gone by now. Instead, he's just getting started — and spending millions to remake the city.
That San Francisco is governed by a strong-mayor system is a “point of view,” in Moritz’s book. “And I just don’t happen to share that view.”
Moritz was born on Sept. 12, 1954, in Cardiff, Wales. His parents, Alfred and Doris, were German-Jewish refugees, and his father was a classics professor at the University of Cardiff.
Fabulous wealth did not appear to be in the cards, as Moritz went the route of the typeset drawer, heading into journalism.
In 1984, he penned the influential book “The Little Kingdom: The Private Story of Apple Computer.” By 1986, he was hired on by Sequoia Capital, and a storybook career ensued. He got in early on many of the companies on your phone: Google, Yahoo, PayPal, YouTube. As well as the phone itself — Apple.
Asked if he sees contradictions in his philanthropic and political giving, Moritz says he doesn’t. “The thing that gets lost on a lot of people,” he says, “is that the political stuff is a tiny percentage of the charitable giving. It takes a village, and it’s difficult to seek perfect alignment. I don’t worry about occasional overlaps.”
The jarring misstep by Moritz’s TogetherSF was, dutifully and thoroughly, covered by Moritz’s San Francisco Standard. If nothing else, Moritz could take solace that his journalists took him seriously when he told them at all-hands meetings that his own activities were fair game for reportage.
He also thinks Farrell will “be more forceful about getting uniformed officers on the street, which is the most effective, cheapest way to make everybody in San Francisco feel a lot safer.”
san-francisco
open-source
drones
artificial-intelligence
security
tech-history
technical
news
poetry
personal
tech-and-socialism
culture
dsa
fiction
film
palestine