Will Gavin Newsom Choose Billionaires Over People?
It’s been a while since I wrote about California Forever, the billionaire-funded effort to build a new 400,000-person “tech utopia” city in rural Solano County. The project is aligned with the Network State, a Silicon Valley movement that seeks to build new billionaire-owned cities all over the world.
California Forever was supposed to seek voter approval via a ballot measure in 2024, but it abandoned the plan after polls showed it headed for massive defeat. One poll showed 70% of voters opposed to the project, including both Democrats and Republicans.
But that wasn’t the end of the project. As the ballot effort flopped, I predicted that California Forever would try to bypass local voters and get the state government to impose the project against the will of the people.
“They could dream up some convoluted scheme to try to use the courts or state power to force Solano County to allow them to build their tech dystopia,” I wrote in April 2024.
That is exactly what’s happening, and the project appears to have a powerful new champion: Gov. Gavin Newsom.
“Gov. Gavin Newsom has been quietly whipping support for California’s billionaire-backed megacity as it faces the loss of a key tenant,” reports the New York Post. “While staying publicly mum on the controversial megaproject, Newsom privately met with California Forever's CEO this spring before launching a behind the scenes push to win support for the project during his final months in office—with his staff even telling lawmakers the project may be a matter of national security.”
The Post reports that Newsom is convening a high-level meeting today in Sacramento to push for the project.
Newsom’s support is not exactly a surprise. Early on, California Forever hired some of his top political consultants. Politico called it “California Forever's A-Team.” But no amount of Sacramento consulting savvy could turn this project into something that could win voter approval. So here comes Plan B: get the governor and the state legislature to impose California Forever on the people of Solano County.
The gambit could work. California Forever has retained Axiom Advisors, the lobbying firm co-founded by Jason Kinney, one of Newsom’s closest friends.
Remember when Newsom created a scandal during the COVID lockdown by attending a dinner at the French Laundry restaurant in Napa County? That was Kinney’s birthday party. The billionaires have also hired two former legislative leaders to advocate for their utopia and lined up support from construction unions.
The strategy is paying off. For months, rumors have swirled that California Forever was seeking support from Newsom’s office. Last week, Newsom’s Office of Business and Economic Development appeared to confirm those rumors by publishing a memo in support of the project.
“GO-Biz believes this is a moment for California to double down on the economy of the future—and to show the country and the world that we remain open for business,” the memo said. “The path forward will require collaboration among state and local government, labor, business, community organizations, and private investors. This memo is meant to frame that conversation—not to prescribe a specific path or outcome.”
Newsom himself has avoided publicly endorsing the project, but the memo says it all. Having worked for a previous California governor, I can say with certainty that the GO-Biz memo states the governor’s position.
California Forever is desperate. A group of tech billionaires spent $900 million to quietly buy up nearly 60,000 acres of land under the leadership of Jan Sramek, a former Goldman Sachs trader from the Czech Republic with no experience building cities. One way or another, they need their city built—regardless of what voters think. A 2024 Vanity Fair profile of Sramek described him as an Ayn Rand enthusiast who, as a young man, was fond of saying: “The question isn’t who is going to let me; it’s who is going to stop me.”
The project has cycled through multiple identities since 2024, including a bid to rebrand itself as essential to national security. For the past year, California Forever has touted the possibility of a new shipbuilding facility, but that deal went to Texas. Unable to win voter support, the project has instead worked to cut annexation deals with individual cities in Solano County.
Now it’s trying a Hail Mary: get Newsom, a lame-duck governor eyeing the White House, to secure the deal before he leaves office. It’s not clear he can pull it off.
“I'm not sure he has the ability to turn the screws to pass special legislation,” political consultant Matt Rexroad told the Post. “The governor has a lot less juice than he did five years ago for something like this.”
Still, it’s clear he’ll try. But siding with the billionaires over the voters also carries risk for Newsom, who hopes to be the Democratic nominee for president in 2028.
In my first New Republic piece on the Network State movement, I wrote:
The people of Solano County are fighting a billionaire land grab that they fear will bring traffic headaches and pollution. Without knowing it, they may also be on the front lines of a battle over whether tech plutocrats can buy enough power to radically transform the political map by yanking democracy right out from under their feet and replacing it with a dystopia of their own design.
The moment of truth has arrived. Newsom has chosen a side, and it may come back to haunt him.
Weird Billionaire Cities
Why are tech billionaires suddenly trying to build new cities everywhere? From Gaza to Greenland to Honduras to California, the globe is awash in Silicon Valley schemes to build new tech-owned territories. My forthcoming book, The Nerd Reich: Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Democracy, exposes the deeper story of the California Forever project.
Click this link to pre-order. Coming Aug. 18! Use this link to support both independent bookstores and this newsletter.
