The new San Francisco fortune: the 100 families who hold the city’s wealth

Artificial intelligence has redrawn the map of money in San Francisco. Of the $516.5 billion in estimated fortunes held by the city’s 100 wealthiest families and individuals, more than a third now traces to AI companies, most of them less than a decade old.

By Wendell Yamashiro

Doris and Don Fisher opened their first store on Ocean Avenue in 1969, selling jeans and record albums. Ms. Fisher came up with the name, the Gap, after the “generation gap” that the couple hoped would bring young shoppers through the door. The shop grew into one of the country’s largest apparel chains, and the family’s fortune into one of San Francisco’s most durable, according to her biography.

Ms. Fisher died in San Francisco in May, at 94. By then, the city’s fortunes were being made in a very different way. The richest newcomers do not sell clothes or put up office towers. They build software that writes software, and the companies they started, some only a few years ago, are valued in private funding rounds at sums that until recently belonged only to the largest public corporations.

An Inquirer analysis of Forbes wealth data as of Oct. 23 finds that 26 of the 100 families and individuals on our list owe their fortunes primarily to artificial intelligence. Together they hold an estimated $181.4 billion, about 35 percent of the $516.5 billion total and more than any other sector, including the payments, social media and enterprise software companies that minted the previous generation of San Francisco wealth. Seven people account for most of it: the co-founders of Anthropic, the AI company that raised money in May at a $965 billion valuation and has said it is preparing to go public.

Wealth on this scale is not new to San Francisco, which has produced railroad barons, bankers and builders since the Gold Rush. What is new is the speed, and the degree to which a single industry, concentrated in a few square miles between Mission Bay and the Financial District, now dominates the top of the ladder. The list below ranks the families and individuals by estimated net worth, with profiles of the top 25. A note on how it was compiled appears at the end.

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Anthropic was founded in January 2021 by seven people who had worked at OpenAI. On June 1, the company said it had confidentially submitted a draft registration statement to the Securities and Exchange Commission for an initial public offering, days after a $65 billion funding round. Forbes now values each co-founder at $15.5 billion. Six of them live in San Francisco, according to Forbes; the seventh, the chief science officer Jared Kaplan, lives in Pacifica and appears in the list’s section for those with close ties to the city. Their combined $108.5 billion exceeds the total held by all 13 ranked finance and venture fortunes on the list.

The founders have also been unusually direct about what such sums might mean. In a January essay, “The Adolescence of Technology”, Dario Amodei, the company’s chief executive, wrote that advanced AI could produce personal fortunes “well into the trillions” and warned about the economic concentration that might follow. In the same essay he wrote that “all of Anthropic’s co-founders have pledged to donate 80% of our wealth.”

Beyond Anthropic, the AI section of the list is crowded with younger founders, many of them building tools for programmers. The four co-founders of Anysphere, maker of the Cursor coding editor, are each worth an estimated $2.5 billion. So are Bret Taylor and Clay Bavor of Sierra, which builds customer-service agents. The three co-founders of Mercor, an AI hiring and data company, are each listed at $2.2 billion. Greg Brockman, OpenAI’s president and a co-founder, is third on the list at $25.5 billion. Sam Altman, OpenAI’s chief executive, is listed at $3.2 billion, a fortune that Forbes attributes to his investments rather than to OpenAI itself.

Nearly all of these figures rest on valuations set in private funding rounds rather than on public share prices, and they can move sharply in either direction before any of the companies lists its stock or a founder sells.

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Before AI, San Francisco’s founder wealth came from the platforms of the 2010s: online payments, home sharing, social networks and software sold to businesses. That cohort, 37 entries worth a combined $169.3 billion, still holds the top spot. Patrick and John Collison, the Irish-born brothers who started Stripe, are worth an estimated $17.5 billion each, according to Forbes, for a family total of $35 billion.

The group’s footprint on the city is visible in its skyline and institutions. Salesforce is the anchor tenant of the tower that bears its name, and Marc and Lynne Benioff’s gifts have named the city’s children’s hospitals. Airbnb’s founders started the company by renting air mattresses in a San Francisco apartment. Others are less familiar to the public: the founders of Samsara, a maker of sensors and software for trucking fleets and factories, are worth a combined $9.8 billion.

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Five entries owe their fortunes to cryptocurrency, worth a combined $23.7 billion. They include Fred Ehrsam, a Coinbase co-founder who later started the investment firm Paradigm, and Jed McCaleb, a co-founder of Ripple and Stellar who lives in Berkeley. Crypto fortunes are the most volatile on the list, rising and falling with the prices of the digital assets their companies hold or depend on.

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San Francisco has long been home to the investors who finance the Bay Area’s companies. Thirteen ranked finance and venture fortunes on the list are worth a combined $78.8 billion, and the family of Warren Hellman, a co-founder of Hellman & Friedman, appears unranked. In the city itself, they include Jim Coulter, a co-founder of the private equity firm TPG; three managing partners at Thoma Bravo, each worth an estimated $3.9 billion; Hemant Taneja of General Catalyst; and Tom Steyer, the founder of Farallon Capital.

Some of the largest finance fortunes tied to the city are just south of it. George Roberts, a co-founder of KKR, lives in Atherton; the Johnson family of Franklin Templeton is based in San Mateo; and Charles Schwab, whose brokerage was founded and long headquartered in San Francisco before moving its headquarters to Texas in 2021, lives in Woodside, according to Forbes.

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Eight ranked entries are inherited or long-established family fortunes, worth a combined $37.6 billion; the Fisher family, whose fortune is classified here under retail, belongs to the same tradition. Their roots run from the Gold Rush, when Levi Strauss began selling dry goods in 1853, through the engineering boom of the early 20th century to the consumer brands of the postwar decades. The heirs of M.H. de Young, whose family owned The San Francisco Chronicle until 2000, were valued by Forbes at $2.5 billion in 2015, the most recent estimate available. Branches of the Pritzker hotel family live in the city and in Marin County.

Several of these families have kept their homes in San Francisco even as the businesses that built their fortunes moved. Bechtel, founded in the city in 1898, is now headquartered in Reston, Va.

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For most of the 20th century, owning San Francisco meant owning its buildings. Today, real estate accounts for less than 1 percent of the wealth on the list: two ranked entries worth an estimated $4.6 billion combined, plus one unranked family. The largest is Jay Paul, a commercial developer worth $3.3 billion, according to Forbes.

The Shorenstein family, whose company once owned a large share of downtown office space, was valued by Forbes at $1.3 billion in 2015, the last time it published an estimate. The pandemic-era collapse in office demand has since taken a heavy toll on the company’s portfolio, The Wall Street Journal reported in 2025, and The San Francisco Standard has reported on properties sold at discounts or taken over by lenders. The Swig family, longtime owners of downtown towers and once of the Fairmont hotels, has no current public estimate; a 1997 Chronicle report put its fortune at several billion dollars.

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Ranks 1 through 84 live in San Francisco, according to Forbes or other public records. Ranks 85 through 97 live elsewhere in the Bay Area but have close ties to the city through their companies or holdings. The last three entries are prominent San Francisco families or investors with no current public estimate of net worth.