Meet the 9 tech millionaires and billionaires who are quietly steering San Francisco city politics

Title: Angel investor and founder of SV Angel

Biggest power play: Conway, one of the tech industry's most prominent and powerful startup investors, also backs political hopefuls. He's poured reported millions of dollars into local elections, including $275,000 in 2012 to pass a ballot measure that lowered tax rates for tech companies that he invested in such as Airbnb, Twitter, and Zynga.

Conway was a longtime friend and advisor to San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee, whose death from a heart attack in December catapulted Supervisor London Breed — a fellow recipient of Conway's political contributions over the years — into the hot seat. Her colleagues on the Board of Supervisors moved swiftly to replace her as interim mayor, saying publicly that they did so to send a message to Conway that "San Francisco can't be bought."

Conway has denied making any attempts to sway the Board of Supervisors' vote.

Title: Cofounder and CEO of Salesforce

Biggest power play: Benioff and his wife, Lynne, want to end family homelessness in San Francisco by 2019, and have donated $11.5 million to Hamilton Families, an organization that puts families on the streets into permanent housing, to do just that.

The San Francisco power couple has contributed millions of dollars to causes from schools to hospitals, writing two $100 million checks to UCSF Benioff Children's Hospitals in San Francisco and Oakland. In 2018, Benioff gave big to sponsor a San Francisco ballot measure that, if passed, will go toward raising teacher salaries.

Title: Mayor of San Francisco and managing director of Thayer Ventures

Biggest power play: After city officials bounced Supervisor London Breed from her seat as interim mayor, they elected Farrell to replace her through the special election. Farrell, who represents one of the wealthiest districts in San Francisco, worked up until then as managing director of Thayer Ventures, an investment firm that has raised $38.5 million to invest in startups that focus on the travel industry.

The interim mayor said he plans to leave politics after the special election in June (he's not running in the election for a permanent mayor), while his firm's website says Farrell will make a full-time return to tech investing.

Title: Cofounder and CEO of Medium

Biggest power play: Williams has been throwing money behind Supervisor London Breed, the leading candidate for mayor of San Francisco. The Twitter cofounder, who began selling off a minority of his company stock in 2017 in order to invest more "in things I care about," donated at least $100,000 through super PACS supporting Breed.

Title: Cofounder and CEO of Workday, and an advisor to venture capital firm Greylock Partners

Biggest power play: Bhusri, whose company makes cloud-based financial and human resource management software, was among the tech luminaries who funded the late Ed Lee's successful mayoral campaign. According to local progressive news site 48 Hills, the tech CEO put up $50,000 in 2018 to back Ron Conway's mayoral pick, Supervisor London Breed.

Titles: CEO and President of Stripe, respectively

Biggest power play: The Collison brothers were fed up with the housing crisis in their adopted hometown of San Francisco. They took action in May, with their payments startup Stripe making a $1 million donation to California YIMBY, a pro-housing advocacy group.

Business Insider's Matt Weinberger wrote in May that "while many of its peers in the tech industry ... like Cisco have tackled the housing crisis by working with local nonprofits and other organizations, Stripe's donation to a pro-housing advocacy group indicates that it's willing to take a stronger political stance on the housing crisis."

Title: Executive Chairman of Airtime and Brigade

Biggest power play: Parker was among the 60 biggest individual donors during the 2016 elections, writing checks to politicians nationally on both sides of the aisle, according to campaign spending watchdog site OpenSecrets. But the Napster billionaire, who splits his time between California and New York, reserves much of his generosity for causes in the Golden State.

In San Francisco, Parker kicked in $50,000 in 2014 to pass a San Francisco ballot measure that is slowly raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour, on top of a $200,000 contribution that year to improve the city's public transit system, Muni.

Biggest power play: In 2011, the social media company, then located in a San Francisco neighborhood known as SoMa, told the city it planned to relocate south, where so many other tech giants are. It would stay and continue to feed money into San Francisco offers, the company said, if it got a free pass on a payroll tax levied inside city limits.

City officials made a compromise: The 1.5% tax on employee salaries would be temporarily waived for any company that agreed to locate in the blighted Mid-Market neighborhood. Since then, tech firms including Zendesk, Uber, Pinterest, Dropbox, Airbnb, and Dorsey's other company, Square, have taken advantage of the so-called "Twitter tax break."

Dick Costolo was CEO of Twitter in 2011, while Jack Dorsey was executive chairman.

Title: Executive editor of Recode

Biggest power play: TBD. But Swisher, a tenacious reporter who was once described by New York magazine as "Silicon Valley's most feared and well-liked journalist," said as recently as September 2017 that she's plotting a San Francisco mayoral run in 2023.

She aims to tell the tech industry to buck up and contribute more to their city.

"If I do this, I'm going to do it my way," she told Rolling Stone.