Newly leaked internal strategy memos offer the clearest picture yet of the political project behind California’s YIMBY and Abundance movements, a project funded by a small circle of Silicon Valley billionaires and explicitly designed to build long-term political power well beyond housing.

The documents, obtained by The American Prospect’s Dylan Gyauch-Lewis and the Phoenix Project, working with the Revolving Door Project, were written by Zack Rosen, founder of California YIMBY and the newer Abundance Network. They describe what Rosen calls a “$260 million capital stack” of committed annual funding, including $120 million from former hedge fund manager and Meta board member John Arnold, $100 million from Clippers owner and former Microsoft executive Steve Ballmer, and $40 million from Meta co-founder Dustin Moskovitz. Rosen later confirmed the documents were authentic, while telling the Prospect that the active grant total is currently closer to $40 million and that one donor figure had been overstated. He did not dispute the others.

Perhaps the most revealing passage concerns California YIMBY itself. Rosen writes that the organization’s funding comes overwhelmingly from the tech industry, stating that “tech founders, Mark Zuckerberg, Dustin Moskowitz, Patrick Collison, Ken Duda are 80%+ of the funding.” That disclosure lines up with public campaign filings. Between 2023 and 2024, tech executives and venture capitalists contributed more than $424,000 to the California YIMBY Victory Fund, with Arista Networks founder Kenneth Duda and his wife accounting for nearly half that total themselves.

The memos are equally candid about what that money is meant to build. Rosen argues that “small dollar internet fundraising makes politics dumber,” lamenting the decline of professional political gatekeepers. He divides political spending into gambling on elections, hiring experts to “count cards,” and building “the house” itself, durable institutions capable of shaping politics for decades. His model is the conservative legal movement that overturned Roe v. Wade. A second memo dismisses the traditional organizing tactics of tenant groups, labor unions, and community organizations as little more than “the Left’s model of advocacy” reduced to “yelling at government,” and credits California YIMBY with helping dismantle what Rosen calls the “exaction-machine of equity groups, labor, and NIMBYs,” placing tenant advocates and organized labor alongside the neighborhood opposition his movement was built to confront.

Those ideas have translated into concrete legislative fights that repeatedly placed California YIMBY alongside the state’s most powerful landlord and real estate interests. In 2024, California YIMBY and YIMBY Action worked alongside the California Apartment Association, the state’s largest corporate landlord lobby, to defeat Proposition 33, which would have repealed Costa-Hawkins and restored local authority to expand rent control. The following year, the same alliance helped defeat AB 1157, legislation that would have lowered the statewide cap on annual rent increases. Both times, the Apartment Association publicly thanked California YIMBY for its partnership. The organization has also taken a formal position against the California Billionaire Tax Act, the statewide wealth tax headed to voters this November, calling it “poorly designed.” The campaign opposing that measure is backed by many of the same tech billionaires whose money built California YIMBY, including Chris Larsen, Sergey Brin, Michael Moritz, and Patrick Collison.

The memos also make clear why California YIMBY invested so heavily in local chapters. Rosen describes Abundance not as a housing campaign but as a multi-decade effort to build durable institutions at every level of government, from city halls to state legislatures and eventually Washington, with housing as the first proving ground rather than the endpoint. That makes local affiliates more than volunteer groups. They are the neighborhood-level infrastructure of a statewide project, and we have our very own here on the Westside. California YIMBY’s “Take Local Action” page identifies Westside for Everyone as one of six LA-based chapters, and Abundant Housing LA lists it as one of its chapters too. The influence of these chapters extends further to the hyper-local neighborhood level, where WFE has a set of neighborhood affiliates, at least two of which carry their own local identity (Building a Better Westchester-Playa and a separate local in Venice).

There is no public evidence that billionaire money flows directly into WFE’s accounts, but the statewide project develops policy priorities, messaging, and strategy that is carried into local bodies like neighborhood councils and city hall through affiliated chapters, often presented as locally generated grassroots positions. By the time a resident encounters one of these groups at a town hall, it looks like a neighborhood organization with a name of its own. Structurally, it is the third rung of a ladder that starts with a $260 million capital stack from tech billionaires fighting against tenant rights.

Measure ULA shows how the message travels down that ladder. Rosen opposed ULA from the outset, privately warning prospective funders that Los Angeles philanthropists had “tanked their housing market (via Measure ULA).” Westside for Everyone did not initially share that view. The group endorsed ULA in 2022, canvassed for it, and celebrated its passage. That changed after a UCLA Lewis Center report, “The Unintended Consequences of Measure ULA,” became the movement’s central intellectual case for rolling the tax back. WFE reversed its position, leaning heavily on the report.

One of the paper’s co-authors, Mott Smith, is both the CEO of a commercial real estate company and a founding board member of the California Council of Infill Builders, a development trade group, and he has since promoted the report’s findings while arguing publicly that ULA should be scaled back. The Lewis Center that published it is named for the Lewis Group of Companies, one of California’s largest homebuilders. None of that determines whether the paper’s numbers are right, but the sequence is hard to miss. Rosen’s opposition came first, the report supplied the argument, and the local chapter that once knocked doors for the tax arrived, three years later, at the same conclusion its statewide network held from the outset.

Rosen’s memos make it clear this ripple effect is intentional, and not a coincidence. He outlines a model where statewide leadership sets the strategic goal, commissions or elevates the argument that supports it, and lets local affiliates carry that argument into municipal politics as a grassroots position. The YIMBY movement on the Westside (and likely in your neighborhood as well) is a working demonstration of this model.