Proposition C, a bill to fight homelessness with a new business tax, slid into San Francisco’s DMs in the middle of the night, politically speaking.

What happened was, in December of last year, San Francisco mayor Ed Lee died unexpectedly. Over the next seven months, the city lived through two mayors and a nail-biting election that dragged on for a week after voting. The Coalition for Homelessness took advantage of the chaos by gathering enough signatures to qualify a ballot initiative to tax local businesses and use the money to help the 7,500 people sleeping on the city’s streets.

Even then, the idea might have remained an underdog, underfunded ballot initiative—until Marc Benioff got involved. The founder and co-CEO of Salesforce—San Francisco’s largest private employer, main tenant and naming rightsholder of the tallest skyscraper in the city (and the adjacent marquee transportation terminal)—started dropping millions of dollars in support of Prop C. Benioff called out his fellow billionaires, by name, on social media and in public appearances—and they responded defensively. Today you can dimly make out their grappling silhouettes looming, kaiju-like, over the financial-district skyline, where the oligarchs’ proxy fight over San Francisco’s greatest shame now threatens to dispel some of the foundational illusions of the way-new economy.

Tax on Gross Receipts

First, though, you have to get over the weirdness of a billionaire spending millions to tax billionaires. Prop C would tax the gross receipts of businesses with administrative offices in San Francisco and more than $50 million in revenue, at a rate ranging from 0.175 percent to 0.69 percent. Over $1 billion in gross revenue, it taxes payroll instead, at 1.5 percent. That’s confusing (more on the revenue-versus-payroll thing in a moment). Still, most people don’t like to pay taxes, and in this the rich are even more like you and me than you and me. Usually. “There is a kind of hypnosis that goes around, that businesses should not support taxes,” Benioff says. “The reality is, unbridled capitalism is not good for anybody, including all the companies benefitting from it. We want society to be successful. We are connected to it, not apart from it.”

Sounds unobjectionable, right? In fact, no one will go on the record saying “Screw homeless people, I don’t want to pay any taxes.” But several of the city’s prominent elected officials—all touting solid liberal credentials—oppose Prop C. They include mayor London Breed and state senator Scott Wiener, who has historically supported more resources to attack homelessness, and last year sponsored a sweeping bill that would’ve boosted housing construction in the extraordinarily expensive state. “I really struggled with this,” Wiener says. “But this measure was vetted only within the homeless advocacy community and then placed on the ballot. If we’re going to to move forward with a tax increase larger than any we have proposed before, this is not the way to do it.”

Plus, Wiener says, city leadership recognizes the problem. It’s hard to miss. San Francisco has turned into a Brechtian horrorshow where dudes in hoodies wearing tech-company-emblazoned backpacks ride shared electric scooters past garbage-strewn tent encampments. It’s got a real dystopian vibe. But the mayor is on it! “They didn’t even give our new mayor an opportunity to set an agenda as the leader of our city,” Wiener says, claiming Breed is seeking “new, aggressive approaches to homelessness.”

To the extent you’re in the market for rationales, that one is buyable. It’s the one that Jack Dorsey, CEO of Twitter and the online payments company Square, made, too. “I want to fix the homelessness problem,” Dorsey tweeted on October 12. “Mayor Breed was elected to fix this. I trust her.”

Benioff, who’d donated several hundred thousand dollars in support of Prop C just a few days earlier, shot back: “Which homeless programs in our city are you supporting? Can you tell me what Twitter and Square & you are in for & at what financial levels?”

“Marc: you’re distracting,” Dorsey replied. “I support the Mayor, and I’m committed to helping her.”

Over all, Benioff has donated $2.5 million to the Yes side, and has been an active campaigner—at WIRED’s 25th anniversary conference, in a New York Times op-ed, in interviews. He points out that Twitter received a sweetheart tax deal to locate its headquarters downtown, and that in his role as a philanthropist he knows exactly who donates money and who does not. “These companies made it in San Francisco, on the backs of the people of San Francisco,” he says. “The companies that have given the least are the ones who are opposing this the most.”

Unfair Burden?

So, great. Hot billionaire-on-billionaire action, with city government caught in the middle, and thousands of unhoused people in the middle of the middle. Except then Dorsey shifted the narrative a little, saying in a tweet that he was primarily opposed to the way the tax would be levied. “We are not opposed to a tax increase—we are opposed to a tax increase that results in Square potentially paying twice as much more than Salesforce, which is four times larger than Square,” a Square spokesperson says. “Jack is focused on working with the mayor to help solve this crisis. He’s not running a personal PR campaign.” Stripe and Visa, which also contributed to the No on C campaign, did not return requests for comment.