In recent years, we’ve read and published a number of stories about the political activation of billionaires — from Elon Musk’s lockdown-induced red-pilling to Bill Ackman’s culture-war conversion after October 7. Lauren Smiley’s new profile of Chris Larsen is also about a billionaire’s civic awakening, though his catalyst was much more mundane: smash-and-grab car burglaries in San Francisco. In 2016, frustrated by what he saw as a feckless police response to petty crime, Larsen used his own money and a local loophole to start covering neighborhoods with private cameras. That camera network is now a central part of the city’s official response to crime, and, more than any other citizen, Larsen has shaped the liberal city’s moderate, law-and-order-inflected COVID rebound. As Smiley writes, the cameras are only one element of Larsen’s larger project: to foster a tech community — once young, transitory, apathetic to local governance — that finally takes a stake in San Francisco. (“We love our far-left brothers and sisters, but they shouldn’t be driving the bus,” Larsen told Smiley. “They just drive the bus off the cliff.”) This is a forensic examination of how, through targeted philanthropy and campaign donations, a billionaire scaled his influence over a city. “We’re all learning now that little things can go a long way,” Larsen says. “It’s a small town.”
—Joy Shan, features editor, New York
