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.”