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.”
Lisa Su, chair and chief executive officer of Advanced Micro Devices Inc. (AMD), during a Bloomberg Television interview in San Francisco, California, US, on Monday, Oct. 6, 2025.
David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images
AMD stock climbed 11% on Wednesday, continuing a massive run since OpenAI announced plans to buy billions of dollars of AI equipment from the chipmaker earlier this week.
On Monday, the ChatGPT maker entered into an agreement to potentially own 10% of AMD, based on its stock price and partnership milestones.
AMD now has a market cap of $380 billion after climbing 4% on Tuesday and 24% on Monday. Shares are up 43% so far this week, on pace for the best weekly gain since April 2016.
The partnership with OpenAI, which has historically been closely linked with Nvidia, has bolstered investor confidence that AMD will be a viable competitor to Nvidia in AI chips.
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AMD CEO Lisa Su told reporters on Monday that the deal was a “win-win” and that its AI chips were good enough to be used in “at-scale deployments,” or very large data centers like the kind OpenAI and cloud providers build.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang on Wednesday reacted to the deal on CNBC’s Squawk Box, saying it was “surprising.”
“It’s imaginative, it’s unique and surprising, considering they were so excited about their next-generation product,” Huang said. “I’m surprised that they would give away 10% of the company before they even built it. And so anyhow, it’s clever, I guess.”
Sundar Pichai, chief executive officer of Alphabet Inc., during the Bloomberg Tech conference in San Francisco, California, US, on Wednesday, June 4, 2025.
David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Google is continuing to put restrictions on remote work, this time with a popular policy called “Work from Anywhere” that was established during the Covid pandemic.
The policy has allowed employees to work from a location outside of their main office for up to four weeks per calendar year. According to internal documents viewed by CNBC, working remotely for even a single day will now count for a full week.
“Whether you log 1 WFA day or 5 WFA days in a given standard work week, 1 WFA week will be deducted from your WFA weekly balance,” according to a document that was circulated over the summer, shortly before the change went into effect.
Google isn’t altering its current hybrid schedule, which was also put in place during the pandemic, allowing employees to work from home two days a week. WFA days are distinct from that policy, giving staffers the flexibility to work remotely, but not at home.
“WFA weeks cannot be used to work from home or nearby,” the document says.
Google didn’t immediately respond to request for comment.
Tech companies are increasingly forcing employees to spend more time in the office, with the peak of Covid now about five years in the past. Microsoft said last month that employees will be expected to work in an office three days a week starting next year, switching from a policy that allowed most of them to work from home 50% of the time or more with manager approval. Amazon went further, instructing corporate staffers to spend five days a week in the office.
Google began offering some U.S. full-time employees voluntary buyouts at the beginning of 2025, and has notified remote workers from several units their jobs would be considered for layoffs if they didn’t return to offices to work a hybrid schedule.
According to the latest changes, employees can’t work from a Google office in a separate state or country during their WFA time due to “legal and financial implications of cross border work.” If in a different location, employees may be required to work during the business hours that align with that time zone, the rules state.
The WFA update doesn’t apply to all Google staffers and may exclude data center workers, and those who are required to be in physical offices. Violations of the policy will result in disciplinary action or termination, the document says.
The issue came up at a recent all-hands meeting.
A top-rated question that was submitted on Google’s internal system described the update as “confusing.”
“Why does even one day of WFA count as a whole week, and can we reconsider the restriction on using WFA weeks to work from home?” the question said.
John Casey, Google’s vice president of performance and rewards, said at the meeting that WFA “was meant to meet Googlers where they were during the pandemic,” according to audio obtained by CNBC.
“The policy was always intended to be taken in increments of a week and not be used as a substitute for working from home in a regular hybrid work week,” Casey said.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said Wednesday that his family’s immigration to the U.S. “would not have been possible” with the Trump administration’s current policy.
President Donald Trump announced in September that employers would have to pay a $100,000 fee for each H-1B visa, a temporary worker visa granted to foreign professionals with specialized skills.
Huang, who was born in Taiwan and later moved Thailand, immigrated to the U.S. at nine years old with his brother. His parents joined them around two years later.
“I don’t think that my family would have been able to afford the $100,000 and and so the opportunity for my, my family and for me to be here … would not have been possible,” Huang told CNBC’s “Squawk Box.”
Trump’s sudden price hike was a shock to the tech sector, which relies heavily on foreign talent, especially from India and China.
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Amazon was the top employer for H-1B holders in fiscal year 2025, sponsoring over 10,000 applicants according to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. Tech juggernauts Microsoft, Meta, Apple, and Google were also among the top H-1B employers, with over 4,000 approvals each.
“Immigration is the foundation of the American dream,” Huang said, “this ideal that anyone can come to America and through hard work and some talent, be able to build a better future for yourself.”
Huang added that his own parents came to the U.S. so that his family could “enjoy the opportunities” and “this incredible country.”
The CEO confirmed that Nvidia, which currently sponsors 1,400 visas, would continue covering H-1B fees for immigrant employees. Huang said that he hopes to see some “enhancements” to the policy so that there’s “still some opportunities for serendipity to happen.”
While his own family’s journey would have been blocked by Trump’s immigration policy, Huang said Trump’s changes will still allow the U.S. “to continue to attract the world’s best talent.”
And other tech executives have expressed support for the changes, with Netflix‘s Reed Hastings calling the fee “a great solution” in a post on X.
“It will mean H1-B is used just for very high value jobs, which will mean no lottery needed, and more certainty for those jobs,” Hastings wrote.
In September, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman told CNBC’s Jon Fortt that he also backed Trump’s changes.
“We need to get the smartest people in the country, and streamlining that process and also sort of outlining financial incentives seems good to me,” Altman said.