SILICON VALLEY'S INFLUENCE GAME

From crypto to A.I., tech titans are pouring money into super PACS to savage their political opponents.

- CHARLES DUHIGG

One morning in February, Katie Porter was sitting in bed, futzing around on her computer, when she learned that she was the target of a vast techno-political conspiracy. For the past five years, Porter had served in the House of Representatives on behalf of Orange County, California. She’d become famous—at least, C-span and MSNBC famous—for her eviscerations of business tycoons, often aided by a whiteboard that she used to make camera- friendly presentations about corporate greed. Now she was in a highly competitive race to replace the California senator Dianne Feinstein, who had died a few months earlier. The primary was in three weeks.

A text from a campaign staffer popped up on Porter’s screen. The staffer had just learned that a group named Fairshake was buying airtime in order to mount a last-minute blitz to oppose her candidacy. Indeed, the group was planning to spend roughly ten million dollars.

Porter was bewildered. She had raised thirty million dollars to bankroll her entire campaign, and that had taken years. The idea that some unknown group would swoop in and spend a fortune attacking her, she told me, seemed ludicrous: “I was, like, ‘What the heck is Fairshake?’”