This piece first appeared in The American Prospect. Read the original here.
According to Zack Rosen, founder of California YIMBY and the Abundance Network, the problem with politics is Americans being too involved. Bemoaning the rise of small-dollar political donations in fundraising documents leaked to the Prospect, Rosen is blunt: “Small dollar internet fundraising makes politics dumber.” Rosen misses what he considers to be a bygone era of elite dominance. Lamenting the current state of democratized influence, Rosen says “the old gatekeepers were political professionals who could count cards; small dollar donors today are amateurs yanking the handles of ActBlue slot machines.”
This sentiment is laid out in substantial detail, filling 31 pages across two separate documents obtained by the Prospect. In an email exchange, Rosen confirmed the documents’ legitimacy.
Rosen and his allies have no need for small-dollar donations or mass-membership politics: They come to do political battle with $260 million annually (yes, each year!) from billionaire benefactors, one document asserts. This “Abundance Capital Stack” is being deployed to organize in all 50 states and consists of a $120 million annual commitment from ex-hedge fund manager and current Meta board member John Arnold, $40 million from Facebook/Meta co-founder Dustin Moskovitz, and $100 million from Steve Ballmer, the L.A. Clippers owner and former Microsoft executive. Ballmer, who is currently embroiled in a scandal surrounding alleged off-book pay for NBA star Kawhi Leonard, was not previously known as a funder of the abundance movement.
Rosen told me that “the committed capital number was an estimate, and doesn’t reflect active funding today,” and that the total amount of actual grants “is probably closer to $40M.” In particular, he said that Arnold’s financial commitment to abundance organizing was incorrect. Rosen did not respond to questions about whether Ballmer and Moskovitz’s funding figures were incorrect as well, or what a more accurate number for Arnold would be. There was no explanation offered for the discrepancy between the estimate in the fundraising pitch and his smaller estimate, although the memo discusses capital commitments, whereas Rosen’s lower figure is specifically active grants.
It is worth noting that there are two publicly announced $120 million abundance grant funds, the Abundance and Growth Fund from Coefficient Giving (née Open Philanthropy) and Jennifer Pahlka’s Recoding America Fund. The former is operating over the course of three years, the latter six. Those alone would equal $64 million a year.
In addition, the network has received significant donations from Michael Bloomberg, the billionaire former Republican mayor of New York City, and Chris Larsen, co-founder of cryptocurrency firm Ripple. Larsen has been a major donor to Democrats in the past, but his company donated nearly $5 million to Donald Trump’s inauguration and received significant regulatory relief from the Trump-controlled SEC just months later. Ripple has also donated millions to Trump’s ballroom project and has benefited from the president promising to include the company’s XRP coin in his promised “crypto reserve.”
The first document, a funding pitch for abundance organizing in California for prospective high-net-worth donors, was obtained by Bay Area political watchdog The Phoenix Project and provided to the Prospect. The second document, obtained from a link embedded in the first, is Rosen and his co-founder Misha Chellam’s attempt to lay out the Abundance Network’s view of modern American political history. The memos are undated, but The Phoenix Project obtained one of them in February and Rosen told me they were both from 2025. Both are available to read below, although Mr. Rosen’s phone number and email address have been redacted for his privacy.
Abundance adherents often bristle at the suggestion that the project is orchestrated by Silicon Valley elites. But as the leaked documents demonstrate, Rosen and his colleagues clearly view it as such, and even frequently use the word “elite” by choice.
In a statement, Phoenix Project executive director Jeremy Mack said that the fundraising document demonstrates that “Abundance to-date is being backed by hundreds of millions of dollars from Silicon Valley’s wealthiest tech elites, and they are investing heavily into a movement that will support their interests.”
ROSEN OPERATES AT THE NEXUS of tech titans’ “hostile takeover” of San Francisco politics through a “grey money” network, documented in reporting from The Guardian and Mission Local. The Phoenix Project has dubbed this overlapping set of organizations and campaigns the “Astroturf Network” and detailed its operations in a set of reports and a pair of influence maps.
According to the fundraising document, Abundance Network itself (as opposed to the broader abundance movement of which it is a small but influential part) is receiving several million annually from tech donors. The organization has an annual budget of $8 million, split roughly evenly between the core network and five local chapters located in San Francisco, Santa Monica, Oakland, Seattle, and Burlington, Vermont. The organization also spends an additional $5 million per campaign cycle. As of the memo’s writing, it had 120 “donor members” who are asked to contribute between $500 and $5,000 annually through membership dues.
While there is little detail on where the remaining Abundance Network funding comes from, the description of the organization’s sister outfit, CA YIMBY, offers one possibility: Silicon Valley titans. CA YIMBY’s funding largely originates from “tech founders: Mark Zuckerberg, Dustin Moskowitz, Patrick Collison, Ken Duda are 80%+ of the funding,” the document states.
Public information tells a similar story with Abundance Network, which has received funding from Chris Larsen, who tops the list of donors to its campaign arm, Families for a Vibrant San Francisco, as well as former Twitch.tv executive Emmett Shear, former Ripple CTO and tech founder Jed McCaleb, and the two co-founders of the messaging software firm Twilio, Jeff Lawson and John Wolthuis. Originally called Abundant SF, the organization was launched by “a network of tech families,” according to The San Francisco Standard.
All this money, unsurprisingly, has generated some success. The documents credit abundance organizations with having “Flipped San Francisco Democratic Party, Flipped San Francisco Board of Supervisors … [and] Flipped Santa Monica City Council.” The ousting of former district attorney Chesa Boudin in 2022 is celebrated in Rosen’s pitch as “a major accomplishment.”
However, many of its preferred ballot propositions have been defeated, and efforts to recall supervisor Connie Chan failed. Chan will likely be in the network’s crosshairs again as she faces off with abundance darling state Sen. Scott Wiener for Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi’s seat in the House of Representatives this fall. Rosen explicitly notes, “We built our San Francisco operation with Scott Weiner’s policy and political team,” referring to him on a first-name basis throughout the document. Five of the six key staff listed are Wiener-world alumni.
The document also highlights that two of the staff have close ties to former mayor London Breed, who recently came under FBI scrutiny after two former staffers, including her onetime chief of staff, alleged that she appointed an ally of Michael Bloomberg to a position on the city’s Board of Supervisors in the hopes of obtaining a well-compensated job at the billionaire’s philanthropy after leaving office. Bloomberg had been a major donor to Breed’s re-election efforts, and is one of the largest funders of the Abundance Network.
The fundraising pitch appears intent on impugning progressives, arguing that voters have been presented a choice between “(A) MAGA states that are delivering progressive outcomes or (B) Blue states that are claiming progressive values but probably increasing inequality and poverty.” The facts sometimes get in the way of this claim.
Rosen notes that California has the highest poverty rate, based on the U.S. Census Bureau’s state-by-state supplemental poverty measure. But the claim that MAGA states are delivering better outcomes is undercut if you look at the next three highest states on that measure: Louisiana, Mississippi, and Florida. The two lowest supplemental poverty rates were in Maine and Minnesota, both of which had been under Democratic trifectas until 2025.
Rosen also claims that Mississippi “went from worst-in the nation education performance to best-in the nation,” which is not remotely true. While the media has become infatuated with the so-called Mississippi miracle, Rosen heavily overstates the state’s turnaround. According to Rosen’s own source, the state improved from 49th to 21st in fourth-grade reading, a worthwhile accomplishment, but substantially different from the claim being made.
Rosen also claims that “Blue States collectively are increasingly failing at governing our public education systems,” seemingly based on an article from the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal, which does not even assert that education systems in Democratic states are actually worse, only that red states are improving faster. U.S. News’s state education ranking puts New Jersey atop the list, with three of the top five states in K-12 education being governed by Democratic trifectas. World Population Review’s data is even better for blue states, with eight out of the top ten spots going to states with Democratic trifectas. The other two are Virginia and Pennsylvania, which have been under divided government.
“ONE WAY TO THINK ABOUT ABUNDANCE NETWORK,” Rosen writes, “is [as] the liberal answer to the tech elite joining the MAGA faction.” Himself a tech founder of software company Pantheon, Rosen writes about how the movement’s goal is to empower tech founders to usher in “an era of true abundance” defined by “the innovation born in Silicon Valley demonstrably improv[ing] the lives of every American.” The message is undoubtedly appealing to tech billionaires with a savior complex, who are upset that the public has grown increasingly skeptical of their promises.
Rosen, who sees the movement’s aims as to “retool the American system of government for the modern era,” extols a decidedly anti-democratic style of governance. He breaks political spending into three categories: “gambling,” meaning donations to individual candidates; “card counting,” meaning turning funding over to experts; and “the house,” meaning creating a political edge and sustaining it over time. Rosen gives the example of overturning Roe v. Wade, which although massively unpopular was able to be accomplished by creating and maintaining a political advantage in the courts. Abundance, as Rosen explains it, wants to be “the house,” because “the big stuff has to be done this way.”
To that end, the Abundance Network is set to build a political infrastructure that can secure a toehold in government and pacify those who might rebel. Ultimately, it is the Great Man Theory of history applied to politics, with an important proviso: Great men must be protected to allow them to orchestrate social progress.
In response to a question about whether he viewed abundance organizing as a counterweight to grassroots fundraising, Rosen said: “Having worked on the Howard Dean campaign, I saw that trying to raise large amounts of campaign money online, in small increments, required a simplification of political messaging that not only flattened complex issues, but turned the internet into a tool for intense and even dangerous political polarization. It was an unintended consequence of trying to counteract ‘big money’ in politics. These incentives helped turn the political internet into a cesspool, and I think it’s important to try to find ways to address it.”
This framing is reinforced in the supporting document, in which Rosen and his co-founder Misha Chellam outline their read of political history. “Maszlow’s monsters,” they write, “are now here: Urban conflagrations, floods, deteriorating norms, and the rebellion against elites” (emphasis added). Popular revolt against oligarchs being considered a problem comparable to cities on fire speaks volumes about the group’s priorities. In Rosen and Chellam’s view, the crucial problem in left-of-center politics is that business elites are not active enough, resulting in “elite abdication.”
The pair’s analysis “came out of a joint 5+ year, 100-book quest for a ‘root disease’ diagnosis for what is crippling left politics and rotting our American democracy.” They spent half a decade, alongside “a community of intellectuals like Ezra Klein, Jerusalem Desmas, Jen Pahlka, Steve Teles, Derek Thompson” working on “piecing that analysis together via an emerging political ideology called Abundance” (emphasis in original). The goal now is “operationalizing it into a powerful political faction that drives public outcomes at scale.”
Rosen declined to answer whether those thought leaders were notified they were being referenced in supplemental fundraising materials or whether they had actively worked on fundraising for Abundance Network, saying, “We have been programming with them and other high-profile supporters of the Abundance Movement since the beginning, including book events, conferences, and other gatherings and events. This is fairly typical of how non-profits operate and build their organizations.”
Demsas and Thompson did not respond to questions about whether they were aware their names were used in supplementary fundraising materials. (Pahlka, a board member of the Abundance Network, was not asked.) Teles said that he was not involved with the document or fundraising though was “honored” to have his name used, despite being unaware of it. He added that he was “thrilled to see the growth of AN over time and Misha Chellam and I have been helping each other think through our various projects in this space for some time, and I think he and Zack are amazing and are doing great work.”
In response to questions about the nature of Klein’s relationship with the Abundance Network, a spokesperson for The New York Times, where he works as an opinion journalist, stressed that he has “no official or paid relationship with the Abundance Network or any similar group.” Klein has spoken at Abundance Network events without compensation, the spokesperson said. They declined to respond to questions about the Times’ policy for opinion journalists engaging in political work and whether they or Klein were aware of his name being used in materials distributed along with a fundraising pitch.
Klein’s involvement as an abundance-flavored power broker in Democratic politics has previously “raised internal concerns at the Times,” according to reporting from Axios.
DESPITE BLAMING THE LEFT AND RIGHT for their “hobbling” of government, the pair seem more forgiving of the right. Unlike in the book Abundance, which does not discuss corporate power (something co-author Ezra Klein has stated retrospectively should have been included), Chellam and Rosen do invoke it, insisting that corporate power has not been exercised robustly enough in our political and civic institutions. “For the right, and corporate power, [the attack on Government] was a dereliction,” as business leaders withdrew from civic leadership. “Elite responsibility,” the document adds later, “is a key element of abundance. Those who modernized our economic institutions for the 21st century must be key contributors to modernizing our public institutions.”
The historical analysis is centered on the claim that industrialists were in fact truly responsible for progressive victories of the mid-20th century. “The progressive movement scaled power only when industrialists brought their financial and social capital to bear on the institutional problems blocking progress.” It cites the Progressive Era as a model, but makes no mention of the labor movement. It lauds Nathan Straus, the founder of Macy’s, for improving food safety by pushing through laws requiring milk pasteurization, but there is no mention of the more expansive Pure Food and Drug Act or the muckraking journalism (like The Jungle by Upton Sinclair) that created a popular political base for reform. It contains no mention of monopolies except a single passing reference to “trustbusters” as one element of the progressive movement.
In short, their view of the Progressive Era, which was in large part a reaction against the concentrated power of wealthy industrialists, cuts out most of the progressive parts and nearly all of the work done by ordinary people organizing grassroots movements.
Given the document’s purpose—soliciting donations from Silicon Valley’s modern robber barons who deeply feared and resented Joe Biden’s trust-busting—these conspicuous absences may have been an attempt to soothe the egos of prospective donors. It may have also been excluded to reconcile this history with the ideological assumptions that elites are a fundamentally positive force in society. Because if that supposition were untrue, well, why would we all get out of their way?
At a time when resistance to AI data centers and economic populism are powering politics, Abundance Network is telling its donors that they can rebuild the Democratic Party in a more billionaire-positive vision. Despite calling the movement “democratic” and repeatedly talking about the need for “bottom-up” organizing, what Rosen and company clearly want is a political infrastructure that reorients politics away from anger at economic elites. Despite reassurances otherwise, abundance certainly appears to be an attempt to steer Democrats away from class war and toward renewing the party’s vows in its increasingly unhappy marriage between the party and the tech sector.
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