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San Francisco Chronicle
4 days ago
- Automotive
- San Francisco Chronicle
How the Trump-Musk divorce could crush California's green-car dreams
After 24 hours of spiteful, online mudslinging with Elon Musk, President Donald Trump fired a new salvo Friday morning: According to reports from the New York Times, Trump vowed to sell the sleek red Tesla he'd bought in March and flaunted on the White House South Lawn, in one of his few concessions to green energy. Musk's electric vehicle company had evidently driven a wedge between the two billionaires, revealed when Trump introduced a 'big, beautiful bill' that would remove the $7,500 tax credit for buyers of Teslas and other zero-emission cars. Although Musk had counterintuitively supported ending the tax credit in December, he appeared to course-correct this week, lambasting Trump's tax bill on social media. 'Elon's upset because we took the EV mandate, which was a lot of money for electric vehicles,' Trump said Thursday, during an Oval Office meeting with German Chancellor Friedrich Merz that got subsumed by the Trump-Musk feud. 'And you know, they're having a hard time, the electric vehicles,' Trump continued. 'And they want us to pay billions of dollars in subsidy.' The ugly divorce battle that ensued pitted the world's richest man, who as Tesla's chief executive has built an empire from clean cars and trucks, against a president whose base largely denies climate change. As Tesla's shares whip-sawed in the stock market, questions swirled not only for Musk's brand, but for the electric vehicle market more broadly. The sparring caused a particularly rough jolt for California, where Tesla had long been key to an ambitious environmental platform. Given California's mandate to convert 35% of new car sales to EVs by next year, leaders have tried to promote these automobiles, offering rebates and free access to carpool lanes while cities steadily expand their charging infrastructure. But the Trump-Musk bromance threw the plodding electric vehicle movement into chaos. People who had once embraced Tesla rushed to boycott the company with such fervor that Tesla sales dropped 21 % in the first quarter of this year. 'It's hard to think of any company whose public image is more closely tied to its chief executive than Tesla,' said Lucas Davis, a professor at UC Berkeley's Haas School of Business who specializes in energy economics. He noted that, in the U.S., vehicle purchases have become tightly intertwined with political ideology. Democrats who in the past reliably bought Teslas to signify their environmental values are now shunning the cars, and they haven't embraced other brands fast enough to compensate. Overall, EV sales in California dipped 3% year-over-year in the first quarter. With the GOP-controlled federal government now pushing to revoke the EV tax credit, sales are likely to plunge further. If Musk had thought he might have won back the liberal environmentalist crowd by attacking Trump this week, he made a grave miscalculation, said Bill Pearce, a marketing expert at UC Berkeley's Haas School of Business. 'This was a classic marketing miscue,' Pearce said, explaining that Musk alienated his original audience by going all in for the president. Although Tesla gained a smaller conservative fan base, Musk has now repelled those people as well with his sniping on social media. He derided Trump's 'big beautiful' tax bill for being 'massive, outrageous' and 'pork-filled,' and alleged a connection between Trump and child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. 'I think he was trying, at least partly, in his criticism of Trump, to get his traditional buying base to say, 'OK, Elon's back on our side,'' Pearce said. 'But that's not the way consumers think.' Even before Trump and Musk's relationship began unraveling, Professor James Sallee of UC Berkeley's agriculture and resource economics department predicted a full-frontal assault by the Trump Administration on electric cars. In a UC Berkeley Energy Institute blog post provocatively titled 'Three Ways to Kill an Electric Vehicle,' Sallee laid out 'three big pieces of the Trump agenda that could threaten the future of electric vehicles': rollbacks of California's zero-emission mandate and federal clean car standards; unwinding of subsidies for EV buyers and manufacturers of batteries or other parts, and tariffs associated with the U.S.-China trade war. Whether Californians' belief in a clean energy future is strong enough to overcome these hurdles remains to be seen. But that financial argument won't hold for the rest of the country, Pearce said. 'And it will definitely slow adoption.'
News18
14-05-2025
- Business
- News18
350 Sq Ft Flat To $34 Billion Worth, HubSpot CEO Yamini Rangan On Humble Start
Last Updated: The Indian-American CEO of HubSpot talked candidly about her 'middle-class' Indian upbringing and how her life in the US differs greatly from hers Yamini Rangan, CEO of HubSpot, a Software company, was born and raised in South India but has since lived in the US for decades. To ensure that her adolescent sons have a connection to their heritage, Rangan nevertheless makes it a point to travel to India regularly. In a recent interview with Kleiner Perkins for his Grit Podcast, the Indian-American CEO of HubSpot talked candidly about her 'middle-class" Indian upbringing and how her life in the US differs greatly from hers. Based in San Francisco today, Yamini Rangan oversees a $34 billion software company and draws an incredible compensation of around $26 million. However, her life wasn't always this comfortable. The executive of Indian descent said in an interview with the Grit Podcast that she grew up in a 350-square-foot home that was 'extremely small." When asked if her family was wealthy when she was growing up, she responded categorically, 'Not at all." 'Our home, which we spent most of our childhood in, was about 350 square feet. Now I can go back and say 'Oh, that was pretty modest' and we were squarely middle class," she said on the Grit Podcast. Rangan further revealed that her mother was a stay-at-home mom and her father owned a little business. She said, 'They did everything possible for us, and we had no desires beyond what we got, but it was a small house." Rangan and her husband have lived in the United States for decades, yet they still make time to travel to India regularly. 'Do you ever go back to India?" Perkins asked the CEO, who responded: 'Yeah, maybe once every couple of years." Her family also supports an orphanage in the place where she was raised, the CEO of HubSpot disclosed. 'I make them [my sons] go and spend days there, because you know it gives them a sense of 'Look where you are and what your responsibility is in society'. It is not just for you to make money and live in the Bay Area," she stated. Rangan grew up in South India, where he was born. At the age of 21, she relocated to the United States to pursue an MBA at the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley, after completing her studies in computer engineering at Bharathiar University. Her remuneration of $26 million places her among the highest-paid CEOs of Indian descent in the United States.
New York Times
06-02-2025
- Politics
- New York Times
San Francisco's New Mayor Is Rich. Is That a Good Thing?
Like the little red labels on the pockets of Levi's jeans, the heirs to the Levi Strauss fortune are woven into the fabric of Bay Area philanthropy. The Sterns, as in Stern Grove, the 12-acre park in San Francisco that hosts free summer concerts. Haas, as in the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley, and Haas Pavilion, where the university's Golden Bears play basketball. Goldman, as in the Goldman Environmental Prize, called the Green Nobels. The families have been a backbone of Bay Area civic life for decades, funding the arts, museums, schools and even professional baseball teams. Without them, the San Francisco Giants might be playing in Florida, and the Oakland Athletics might have skipped town much earlier than last fall. Now, the expansive family tree has extended into city politics. San Francisco's new mayor, Daniel Lurie, is a wealthy philanthropist himself, his fortune coming from his late stepfather, a Strauss heir and longtime Levi's chief executive. His rise has inspired optimism in a city desperate for change, but also questions about whether a political neophyte, worth hundreds of millions of dollars, can run San Francisco. At the same time, institutions all over the region are arguably beholden to his family. Mr. Lurie ousted a fellow Democrat, London Breed, after spending $9.51 million of his own fortune on the race — $52 for every vote he received, one of the biggest outlays of personal wealth by a mayoral candidate in American history. Mr. Lurie's mother, the billionaire Mimi Haas, a longtime benefactor of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, spent an additional $1 million on his campaign. The mayor and his supporters say his wealth means that he owes no favors in a city that has grappled with widespread corruption. 'I don't owe anybody anything except you, the taxpayers and the residents,' he said during the campaign, later saying he would take just $1 of the mayor's $383,000 salary. And Mr. Lurie points to examples like Michael Bloomberg, the billionaire former mayor of New York City, as his guiding lights. Skeptics, though, question whether Mr. Lurie's approach to his new job — which focuses heavily on tapping benefactors and hiring aides from the business world — could hand the rich too much say. Justin Dolezal, a bar owner who founded Small Business Forward to help mom-and-pop shops get attention from City Hall, said he believes Mr. Lurie has good intentions, but the mayor's wealth and connections make him nervous. 'A deep obsequiousness to big money, big power and big tech has caused a lot of the problems that we experience day to day in San Francisco,' Mr. Dolezal said, citing homelessness and the pushing out of the middle class. 'Being raised in that world does color your view,' he said. In a city awash in new money, Mr. Lurie comes from wealth that is just about as old as San Francisco itself. His stepfather, Peter Haas, was the great-grandnephew of Levi Strauss, an immigrant from Bavaria, one of a wave of German Jewish men who fled antisemitism in the 1850s and made their way to San Francisco seeking riches. But Strauss found his wealth in bluejeans, not gold nuggets. He patented the use of rivets at the points of strain on denim pants, making them a durable favorite of workers. He became one of the 'merchant princes of San Francisco' who were 'mining the miners,' as the local historian Gary Kamiya put it. Strauss, who was childless, died in 1902 and left his fortune of about $6 million, worth roughly $220 million in today's dollars, to four nephews. Today, the publicly traded company is worth more than $7 billion, with the Haas family retaining majority control. Mr. Lurie's mother is its largest shareholder. Strauss himself was a philanthropist, supporting several local Jewish organizations and funding 28 scholarships at U.C. Berkeley, which still exist. His heirs — the Haas, Goldman and Stern families — have continued his giving through their numerous foundations. Their mark is everywhere once you start looking, from Berkeley's Goldman School of Public Policy to the hilltop Walter Haas playground and dog park with views of the city skyline. Walter Haas Jr. rescued the struggling Oakland Athletics baseball franchise from a move to Denver in 1980 and turned the team around. It won the World Series in 1989, years before John Fisher — an heir to the Gap clothing store fortune — bought it and eventually yanked it out of Oakland. The Goldman family helped keep the San Francisco Giants from moving to Florida. 'It would be hard to spend any amount of time here in this community without being touched by the institutions the family has helped bolster,' said Larry Baer, the Giants' president, who has known the family for decades. The city's tech titans have been less reliable donors than older generations of wealthy residents. Mr. Baer said some tech leaders think that 'San Francisco is just where my company is,' whereas Mr. Lurie's focus, he said, is squarely on making his hometown better. The tech world, though, helped fund Mr. Lurie's splashy inauguration festivities, with Laurene Powell Jobs's Emerson Collective group, the angel investor Ron Conway and Kyle Vogt, the co-founder of the driverless car company Cruise, among the contributors. Another Strauss heir has gotten into politics. Daniel Goldman, a cousin by marriage of Mr. Lurie's, just began his second term in Congress, representing New York. He, too, poured money into his first campaign, spending $4 million in 2022. Mr. Goldman, who vacationed with Mr. Lurie when they were children and shared a Manhattan apartment with him as young adults, said their interest in politics was an extension of the family's commitment to public service. 'We have been incredibly blessed to be the beneficiaries of the American dream,' Mr. Goldman said. 'We are very much committed to making sure that every American gets access to it.' So far, Mr. Lurie's lack of government experience has proved more notable than his riches. He vowed he would declare a state of emergency on fentanyl on his first day in office, hoping to clear bureaucratic hurdles. But the city's lawyers had to tell Mr. Lurie's team that only sudden, unforeseen disasters like earthquakes and the Covid-19 pandemic qualified as emergencies. Mr. Lurie instead introduced regular legislation, which he simply branded an emergency. It was passed by the Board of Supervisors on Tuesday and will speed along contracts related to the fentanyl crisis and allow the city to accept private donations to build more homeless shelter beds or fund other solutions. But the notion of asking rich people to pay for the regular operations of city government is different from tapping them for a one-time museum exhibit or college building. Ben Rosenfield, a former controller who advised Mr. Lurie after his election, said it was 'reasonable and responsible' to raise private money for the crisis, especially as the city faces a budget deficit of nearly $1 billion over the next two years. But turning to wealthy people to pay for homeless services could come with strings, said Jane Kim, a former supervisor who worked with Mr. Lurie and his anti-poverty nonprofit, Tipping Point, to build affordable housing in her district. 'Who gets to decide how to spend those dollars?' Ms. Kim asked. 'Is it the billionaire, or is it based on what the people of the city would like to see?' Philanthropy will surely not refill the office spaces and retail shops that are still empty five years after the pandemic's onset. After hammering Ms. Breed during the campaign for leaving a once-vibrant downtown neglected, Mr. Lurie got bad news of his own just days into his new job. Bloomingdale's is leaving its giant downtown location, and Walgreens is closing 12 stores. Mr. Lurie has said he has called chief executives around the country, pitching them on moving to the city. One company he will not need to woo is Levi's. Its headquarters remain where they began — in the heart of San Francisco.
