After the defeat of Proposition F, San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors eventually agreed to many of Airbnb’s suggestions. By then, Lehane had moved on to other locations. He began similar Airbnb campaigns in dozens of other cities, including Barcelona, Berlin, New York, and Mexico City. When the U.S. Conference of Mayors convened in Washington, D.C., in 2016, Lehane was invited to speak after Michelle Obama. “Read my lips,” he told the gathering. “We want to pay taxes.” Airbnb soon had agreements with more than a hundred cities, and when local politicians proved intransigent—leaders in Austin, for instance, seemed immune to Airbnb’s overtures—the company simply went over their heads. In Texas, it persuaded the state legislature to make it hard for any municipality to ban short-term rentals. Today, Airbnb has agreements with thousands of cities.
A few years after Lehane joined Airbnb, a venture capitalist pulled him aside at a party and said, “It used to be, hiring the right C.F.O. was the most important thing to make sure a company goes public. But you’ve proved a political person is just as important.” Lehane, however, had had an even bigger insight. These campaigns had revealed that tech companies—particularly firms, like Airbnb, with platforms that connect people who might otherwise have trouble finding one another—were now potentially the most powerful cohort in politics. “At one point, organizations like labor or political parties had the ability to organize and really turn out large numbers of voters,” Lehane told me. Today, Internet platforms have the bigger reach; a tech company can communicate with hundreds of millions of people by pushing a button. “If Airbnb can engage fifteen thousand hosts in a city, that can have an impact on who wins a city-council race or the mayoralty,” Lehane told me. “In a congressional or Senate race, fifty thousand votes can make all the difference.” Of course, simply having a huge user base doesn’t guarantee that Airbnb can get everything it wants. Voters respond only to enticements that they find persuasive. But companies like Airbnb, Lehane understood, could make arguments faster, and more efficiently, than nearly any political party or other special-interest group, and this was a source of considerable power. “The platforms are really the only ones who can speak to everyone now,” Lehane said.
For the tech industry, the Trump years were a bewildering mess. The President attacked tech platforms for being biased against conservatives, and liberals railed against Silicon Valley’s social-media companies for propelling Trump into the White House. Tech executives declared their support for the industry’s many immigrants in the face of Trump’s Muslim ban and border separations; they also contended with walkouts and protests from employees over racial injustice, sexual harassment, and all-gender bathrooms—subjects that neither an engineering degree nor business school had prepared them for. When Joe Biden won the Presidency, in 2020, the Valley’s leaders were relieved. The Biden Administration seemed like a return to the Pax Obama, an era when tech was considered cool and politicians boasted of knowing Mark Zuckerberg. Biden’s victory also meant that Lehane, with his deep roots in the Democratic Party, was unquestionably Silicon Valley’s top political guru. Companies sought him out; employees loved that he was generous with credit and made politics fun. (Many former colleagues talk proudly about the nicknames that he bestowed upon them.) Most of all, he made the people he worked with feel like they were on a righteous quest. Peter Ragone, a prominent adviser to numerous Democratic politicians, told me that, among the handful of political consultants transforming Silicon Valley, “Chris is the tip of the spear. His capacity for processing information at speed is breathtaking.”
The Valley’s enthusiasm for Biden, however, was short-lived. The President quickly appointed three prominent tech skeptics—Gary Gensler, Lina Khan, and Jonathan Kanter—to oversee the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Federal Trade Commission, and the antitrust division of the Department of Justice, respectively. Soon the government was suing or investigating Google, Apple, Amazon, Meta, Tesla, and dozens of other companies. Some of those suits and inquiries had been initiated under Trump, but Biden’s S.E.C. found a particular target in the cryptocurrency industry. Gensler, an ally of Elizabeth Warren, filed more than eighty legal actions arguing that crypto firms or promoters had violated the law, most often by selling unregistered securities. Some of the executives being sued by the S.E.C. had contributed lavishly to the Democrats. Brad Garlinghouse, the C.E.O. of the crypto firm Ripple, who had been a fund-raising bundler for Obama, was among those under legal fire, and he clearly felt victimized. He told Bloomberg that the federal government was acting like “a bully,” and tweeted, “Dems continue to enable Gensler’s unlawful war on crypto—sabotaging the ability for American innovation to thrive. It’s no wonder the GOP has announced a pro-crypto stance . . . . Voters are paying attention.” (Last year, a federal judge upheld some portions of the S.E.C.’s case against Ripple and dismissed others.)
To certain people, the government’s approach felt oddly aggressive. One crypto executive told me she discovered that her bank accounts had been frozen—with no explanation—only when she tried to make a withdrawal to repair a catastrophic home-septic-system failure. Around this time, various regulatory agencies were warning banks about the risks posed by the crypto industry. When the executive’s accounts were later unfrozen—again, without a clear explanation—she was left wondering if the government’s goal was to intimidate the industry. (The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, which regulates national banks, said that it does not direct banks to freeze individual accounts.)
Cartoon by Michael Maslin
The Biden Administration’s oppositional stance, however, seemed warranted when, in 2022, FTX—the enormous crypto exchange and hedge fund led by Sam Bankman-Fried—imploded amid revelations that more than eight billion dollars had been misallocated or lost. Bankman-Fried had been a prolific political donor, and violating campaign-finance law was among the crimes for which he was arrested. Another crypto executive told me that, after the FTX scandal, many figures in the industry “just wanted to put our heads down and disappear,” adding, “The less people noticed us, the better.”
But among Silicon Valley’s most moneyed class retreat wasn’t an option. The powerful venture-capital firm Andreessen Horowitz had already raised more than seven billion dollars for crypto and blockchain investments. The “super angel” investor Ron Conway had poured millions of dollars into crypto firms through his venture fund. Lehane urged some of the largest crypto investors and companies, many of whom were bickering on Twitter, to instead form a coalition devoted to changing the public narrative. He began hosting private biweekly gatherings, known as the Ad-Hoc Group, where various collaborations were discussed. Eventually, a former partner at Andreessen Horowitz, Katie Haun, recommended that the large crypto firm Coinbase, where she was a board member, bring on Lehane as an adviser.
Lehane met with Coinbase’s co-founder Brian Armstrong and told him that, just as with Airbnb, what seemed like a crisis was actually an opportunity. “This is not the time to go quiet,” Lehane told him. “This is your chance to define your company and the industry, and prove you’re different from FTX.” In 2023, Lehane joined Coinbase’s Global Advisory Council. Twenty-five days later, the S.E.C. sued the firm.
Lehane established a war room with the primary goal of convincing politicians that the political consequences of being anti-crypto would be intensely painful. The person familiar with Fairshake, who was then an employee at Coinbase, told me, “It wasn’t really about explaining how crypto works, or anything like that. It’s about hitting politicians where they are most sensitive—reëlection.” Armstrong clarified this aim at a crypto conference in 2023. The goal, he said, was to ask candidates, “Are you with us? Are you against us? Are we going to be running ads for you or against you?”
Although Lehane’s basic strategy resembled the one he’d used at Airbnb, that campaign had been focussed on municipal issues and local political races. The crypto effort was national in scale, targeting Senate and House races—and potentially even the Presidential contest—and would require significantly more money. Lehane suggested to Armstrong that crypto firms set aside fifty million dollars for outreach. Let’s earmark a hundred million, Armstrong replied. Coinbase, Ripple, and Andreessen Horowitz donated more than a hundred and forty million dollars to Fairshake, the crypto super pac. Executives at other firms contributed millions more.
Lehane, collaborating closely with Fairshake, began crafting a pro-crypto message and helping to build a “grassroots” army. “We need to demonstrate there’s a crypto voter,” he told the Coinbase team. “There’s millions and millions of Americans who own this stuff. We need to prove they’ll vote to protect it.”
The Federal Reserve has said that in 2023 fewer than twenty million Americans owned cryptocurrencies. Polling indicates that the issue is not an electoral priority for many voters. One Coinbase staff member pointed out this discrepancy to Lehane, saying, “I don’t know if there is a crypto voter.”
“Then we’re going to make one,” Lehane replied.
Coinbase began loudly promoting the results of surveys reporting to show that fifty-two million Americans owned cryptocurrencies, and that many of them intended to vote to protect their digital pocketbooks. Those polls indicated that sixty per cent of crypto owners were millennials or Gen Z-ers, and forty-one per cent were people of color—demographics that each party was trying to woo. Lehane also quietly helped launch an advocacy organization, Stand with Crypto, which is advertised to Coinbase’s millions of U.S. customers every time they log in, and which urges cryptocurrency owners to contact their lawmakers and sign petitions. The group says that it currently has more than a million members. The Coinbase employee told me that Stand with Crypto would identify a city with a significant population of crypto enthusiasts, like Columbus, Ohio, and then inundate them with push notifications aimed at organizing town halls and rallies. The employee explained, “If you can get fifty or sixty people to show up, with good photo angles you can make it look like hundreds. In small states or close elections, that’s enough to convince a candidate they should be paranoid.”
This supposed army of crypto voters fed directly into the next stage of the assault: scaring politicians. Stand with Crypto built an online dashboard that assigned grades to U.S. senators and representatives—and to many of their challengers—which reflected their support for crypto. The scores seemed to inevitably be either “A (Strongly supports crypto)” or “F (Strongly against crypto),” though the data undergirding the grades were sometimes specious. “Most of them hadn’t really taken a side,” another Coinbase staffer told me. “So we’d, you know, look at speeches they’d given, or who they were friends with, and kind of make a guess. If you were friends with Elizabeth Warren, you were more likely to get an F.”
Nevertheless, Lehane insisted that Fairshake maintain a nonpartisan tone. The super PAC was careful to support an equal number of Democratic and Republican candidates, and, following Lehane’s advice, it planned to stay out of the 2024 Presidential race altogether. A venture capitalist who has advised the crypto industry told me that the group’s nonpartisan stance was essential, because, “if we want to get the right regulations in place, we have to get a bill through Congress, which means we need votes from both parties.” Moreover, Fairshake’s goal was to “create a nonpartisan cost for being negative on crypto and tech,” the venture capitalist added. “People need to know there are consequences.”
To make this point, Lehane and Fairshake wanted to find a contest in which the group’s spending was certain to attract national attention. Fairshake compiled a list of high-profile races, and near the top was the fight to replace Dianne Feinstein in California. The obvious target was Porter, whose strongest opponent in the Democratic primary was Representative Adam Schiff. California was reliably blue, and so, if Fairshake helped defeat Porter, the group wouldn’t get blamed for handing a seat to the Republicans. What’s more, California’s primary occurred on March 5th—early in the campaign season—which meant that Porter’s race would get lots of attention and Fairshake would have time to broadcast its involvement and petrify candidates in other states. Because Porter was friendly with Elizabeth Warren, she could be painted—fairly or not—as anti-crypto. Best of all, many polls indicated that Porter was unlikely to win the primary anyway, so if the super PAC “went in with a big spend, and made a big splash and she lost, Fairshake could take the victory lap regardless of whether it tipped the scales,” the Coinbase employee said. The calculation was prescient: Fairshake’s spending helped doom Porter in the primary, and the general election appears to be a lock for Schiff (who got an A from Stand with Crypto). As another political operative put it, “Porter was a perfect choice because she let crypto declare, ‘If you are even slightly critical of us, we won’t just kill you—we’ll kill your fucking family, we’ll end your career.’ From a political perspective, it was a masterpiece.” Porter will be out of government at the end of this year.
