San Francisco Mayor-elect Daniel Lurie taps OpenAI’s Sam Altman and other business leaders for help with transition
Mayor- Elect Daniel Lurie speaks in St. Mary’s square a day after winning the Mayoral race in San Francisco on Friday, Nov. 8, 2024.
Gabrielle Lurie | San Francisco Chronicle | Hearst Newspapers | Getty Images
San Francisco’s Mayor-elect Daniel Lurie has begun tapping tech heavyweights and business leaders to help with his goal of overhauling the city’s image. His transition team includes OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and former Twitter CFO Ned Segal.
Lurie, a centrist Democrat and Levi Strauss heir, ousted incumbent London Breed in a closely-watched race and will step into the role in 2025. San Francisco-based companies need to invest in the city and commit to their communities, Lurie told CNBC in an interview. He named both Visa and Salesforce as models for this “two-way street.”
“I’ve had great conversations with Sam Altman,” Lurie said. “He wants to put down roots here in San Francisco. We want to lean into being the home of AI, which we are, and I will continue to invest in that.”
The city can’t have all its eggs in one basket and needs to expand into other business sectors as well, Lurie said.
“We will go recruit companies from all sectors to come back to San Francisco,” Lurie said. “Whether it’s healthcare, whether it’s technology [or] whether it’s arts and culture, we want to be the number-one spot for business again in this country.”
Lurie, who founded the homelessness nonprofit Tipping Point, has plans that include declaring a state of emergency over the fentanyl crisis on day one in office and a previously disclosed proposal to build 1,500 shelter beds within his first six months in office. A fully-staffed police department and 911 dispatch office will be necessary to help bring businesses and workers back to the city, Lurie said.
“We need to make sure we get our behavioral health crisis under control, which means we need to build more mental health and drug treatment beds,” Lurie said. “We have to get people off the streets. We have to do that compassionately, but we also have to send a message — and we are — to the country and to the world that San Francisco is no longer a place that you come to deal drugs or to do drugs or to sleep on our streets.”
Lurie added, “We didn’t get into this overnight, and it won’t be fixed overnight.”
Part of the solution he envisions will be bringing workers back to offices, modeling that goal with his administration. Lurie says his team will be in five days a week, and he hopes that the administration’s work in cleaning up streets will entice others to do the same. More affordable housing will also be a priority to ensure workers can afford to live in the city, he said.
He’s also hopeful that future events the city will host in the next year and a half — from the JPMorgan Healthcare Conference to the 2025 NBA All-Star Game and Super Bowl LX in 2026 — will help invigorate the city.
“I’ve talked to Jamie Dimon,” Lurie said. “I talked to the commissioner of the NBA. They all want San Francisco to come back.”
Lurie’s election is part of a wider trend in the state of moving to the right of progressive policies and leaders of the past. More conservative district attorneys were voted into office in major counties, including Nathan Hochman in Los Angeles, while Alameda county District Attorney Pamela Price and Oakland Mayor Sheng Thao faced successful recalls. California voters also adopted a proposition that increases penalties for certain drug and theft crimes while rebuffing a measure to raise the state’s minimum wage to $18 an hour. Up and down the state, voters’ focus was on the economy, according to polling from the Public Policy Institute of California, which found the economy, cost of living and inflation were the key issues for 35 percent of voters this cycle .
“In some ways it’s remarkable that California remained as much of a blue state and Democratic stronghold as it is considering the way people were feeling about their own financial circumstances, especially compared to four years ago,” Mark Baldassare, PPIC’s survey director, said.
This comes as California Gov. Gavin Newsom has convened a special legislative session next week in an effort to prepare the state and safeguard policies around climate change, reproductive rights and more ahead of President-elect Donald Trump’s return to the White House in January.
Lurie told CNBC that he disputes the “shift to the right” narrative in the city, adding that his biggest challenge will be combatting the cynicism around what San Francisco has become.
“What we have done in San Francisco is get back to common sense with this election,” Lurie said. “It’s about getting results for the people of San Francisco — allowing people to struggle and die in our streets is not progressive.”
Jensen Huang, chief executive officer of Nvidia Corp., during the US-Saudi Investment Forum at the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC, US, on Wednesday, Nov. 19, 2025.
Stefani Reynolds | Bloomberg | Getty Images
In the weeks leading up to Nvidia’s third-quarter earnings report, investors debated whether the markets were in an AI bubble, fretting over the massive sums being committed to building data centers and whether they could provide a long-term return on investment.
During Wednesday’s earnings call with analysts, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang began his comments by rejecting that premise.
“There’s been a lot of talk about an AI bubble,” Huang said. “From our vantage point we see something very different.”
In many respects, Huang’s remarks are to be expected. He’s leading the company at the heart of the artificial intelligence boom, and has built its market cap to $4.5 trillion because of soaring demand for Nvidia’s graphics processing units.
Huang’s smackdown of bubble talk matters because Nvidia counts every major cloud provider — Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and Oracle — as a customer. Most of the major AI model developers, including OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI and Meta, are also big buyers of Nvidia GPUs.
Huang has deep visibility into the market, and on the call he offered a three-pronged argument for why we’re not in a bubble.
First, he said that areas like data processing, ad recommendations, search systems, and engineering, are turning to GPUs because they need the AI. That means older computing infrastructure based around the central processor will transition to new systems running on Nvidia’s chips.
Second, Huang said, AI isn’t just being integrated into current applications, but it will enable entirely new ones.
Finally, according to Huang, “agentic AI,” or applications that can run without significant input from the user, will be able to reason and plan, and will require even more computing power.
In making the case of Nvidia, Huang said it’s the only company that can address the three use cases.
“As you consider infrastructure investments, consider these three fundamental dynamics,” Huang said. “Each will contribute to infrastructure growth in the coming years.”
Reversing the slide
In its earnings release, Nvidia reported revenue and profit that sailed past estimates and issued better-than-expected guidance. Last month, Huang provided a $500 billion forecast for sales of the company’s AI chips over calendar 2025 and 2026.
The company said on Wednesday that its order backlog didn’t even include a few recent deals, like an agreement with Anthropic that was announced this week or the expansion of a deal with Saudi Arabia.
“The number will grow,” CFO Colette Kress said on the call, saying the company was on track to hit the forecast.
Prior to Wednesday’s results, Nvidia shares were down about 8% this month. Other stocks tied to the AI have gotten hit even harder, with CoreWeave plunging 44% in November, Oracle dropping 14% and Palantir falling 17%.
Some of the worry on Wall Street has been tied to the debt that certain companies have used to finance their infrastructure buildouts.
“Our customers’ financing is up to them,” Huang said.
Specific to Nvidia, investors have raised concerns in recent weeks about how much of the company’s sales were going to a small number of hyperscalers.
Last month, Microsoft, Meta, Amazon and Alphabet all lifted their forecasts for capital expenditures due to their AI buildouts, and now collectively expect to spend more than $380 billion this year.
Huang said that even without a new business model, Nvidia’s chips boost hyperscaler revenue, because they power recommendation systems for short videos, books, and ads.
People will soon start appreciating what’s happening underneath the surface of the AI boom, Huang said, versus “the simplistic view of what’s happening to capex and investment.”
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