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In today’s email: New reporting and updates on Silicon Valley’s favorite charity, MacKenzie Scott’s personnel, and Jeff Bezos’ latest effort to stay buff forever.

A few Tuesday thoughts…

• Earlier this winter, I reported that Tim Draper, the billionaire venture capitalist and free-market evangelist, was considering pulling his financial support from his effort to outlaw public-sector unions in the state of California. Draper was upset with the ballot language he had been given by the state, which he thought made his initiative less likely to pass. Well, Draper told me over the weekend that his campaign is now kaput—he is officially pulling the plug for 2022. “We are going to wait and see whether the unions improve education and government service without it,” he said. “Sitting tight until next election.”
• There are a number of other upcoming campaigns I’m watching as a barometer of Silicon Valley’s political strength. The first great test of tech donor power is in just three weeks, as local voters get their say in the recall of three progressive members of the San Francisco school board—a campaign that has been infused with tech money and attracted national attention. Dave Weigel has a good roundup of the controversy, which reflects larger debates over school closures and merit-based admission. (A lesser test that same day: whether tech favorite Bilal Mahmood can force his way into the run-off for the state assembly seat in San Francisco.) Many of the same progressive vs center-left tensions are also at play in the high-profile, tech-donor-fueled campaign against San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin, who faces a recall in June. Meanwhile, it’s not too early to begin thinking about who might run early next year to replace Nancy Pelosi, whose congressional district encompasses the city. The 81-year-old said today that she is running for reelection, but she is expected to step down if Democrats lose the House in November.
• Speaking of national politics, the Senate Democratic voting-rights push ended up failing spectacularly, as expected, leaving some liberals deeply curious, shall we say, about why Joe Biden and Chuck Schumer pursued the legislation in the first place. Here’s my piece from last week that explains part of the story. In short, the party’s strategy was shaped in part by the efforts of its donor class, some of whom are further left than their elected officials. I also discussed this dynamic with Peter Hamby on the latest episode of The Powers That Be, our podcast here at Puck.
• With the markets sinking over the past few weeks, where are the wealth-tax-hawking liberals calling for tax credits to Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos? Recall that if the billionaire tax from Ron Wyden had become law, people like Musk would have made a massive, one-time payment on the value of most of his assets. But the bill also stipulated that the I.R.S. would eventually have to process huge deductions to gazillionaires who end up in the red. Can you imagine?
• We’ll get some revealing, new campaign-finance reports over the next week that will reveal the last six months of federal donations by the world’s wealthiest individuals. I’ll be paging through them and will report back.

Can Yuri Milner and Jeff Bezos End Death?

The inside conversation about Silicon Valley’s favorite charity, MacKenzie Scott’s personnel debate, and Bezos’ latest effort to perfect his physique.

For as long as I can remember, journalists and supposedly savvy observers have been reflexively dismissive, if not outright hostile, to Silicon Valley’s ongoing obsession with life-extension research. There is, after all, something seemingly contemptible—and a little bit funny—about billionaires wasting money on futile efforts to live forever...

FOUR STORIES WE'RE TALKING ABOUT