Chris Larsen, co-founder of the crypto company Ripple Labs and the 252nd-richest person on the planet, is studiously unostentatious. He speaks in an even voice with analytical efficiency, calibrating whether to politick or pounce. He considers schmoozy events a waste of time and disappears from appointments at precise moments in a black SUV. Although he’s called Silicon Valley’s “fetish for disruption” self-indulgent and “Trump-like,” he prefers to move with speed. “I don’t like that Giving Pledge thing at all,” he tells me. “It’s slow money. You make an announcement, but the money doesn’t get out. So I think it’s like, Go, go, go fast.” He’s recently written checks to a range of pressing causes: $3.5 million to Alex Bores, the New York congressional candidate who wants to federally regulate AI; $2 million to study how the oil-and-gas industry can transition from, well, oil and gas. An ongoing target of his impatience is his hometown. “A frustrating thing about San Francisco: Everything just takes forever because of the bureaucracy. So anything we can do is just go, go, go.”

In the years since San Francisco emerged blinking from COVID, the evidence of Larsen’s largesse has been visible on nearly every street, paying for things the city’s too strapped for tax dollars to cover. In the Mission and Chinatown and the Avenues, merchant corridors that he helps power-wash ($3 million). In the Tenderloin, street festivals and decorative security gates on storefronts ($5 million) and a bid to turn a gambling den into a community center ($2 million). In the Castro, a new rainbow flag ($10,000).

His biggest contribution — what he considers his “legacy project,” according to his team — is in the realm of public safety. A decade ago, as rates of petty crime were cresting, Larsen found a way to overlay neighborhoods with a network of private cameras. This could have been where the project ended, the hobbyhorse of an idiosyncratic billionaire. San Francisco had long been Big Brother skeptical, a progressive bastion that kept a tight lid on surveillance. But in 2024, as outrage about property crime and street conditions swelled, the city elected a new mayor, Daniel Lurie, the Levi’s heir and former nonprofit CEO who won on a moderate platform of public safety and his skill at tapping private money to solve social problems. A major goal of his administration is to “reverse the so-called doom-loop narrative”: the story, amplified by the media, of San Francisco’s pandemic descent from a sparkling tech hive to a hellscape of fentanyl users and criminal mayhem. Expressing admiration for Michael Bloomberg, Lurie took a $1 salary and walked into a looming budget crisis declaring a new era of public-private partnerships.

Today, the camera network Larsen built plugs into San Francisco’s post-doom-loop policing apparatus, where it’s being combined with drones and license-plate readers to make quicker arrests. Those arrests are coordinated at the Real-Time Investigation Center, housed in Larsen’s former Ripple headquarters on the eighth floor of a Renaissance Revival high-rise in the Financial District. Where Larsen once sat, flat-hierarchy style, among employees, San Francisco Police Department officers now watch a wall of screens displaying 911 dispatch calls and “hot list” hits from Flock Safety license-plate readers. Police can beam into 2,700 private cameras posted around the city and watch footage from a growing fleet of 93 drones. The total cost came to $9.4 million, all paid by Larsen.

At the unveiling in December, an upbeat Mayor Lurie credited RTIC with helping usher in the city’s comeback. “Precise, fast, safe,” he said at the press-conference podium with Larsen standing behind him between the sheriff and the police chief. A slideshow announced 800 arrests so far. Lurie ticked off more stats. Crime down 30 percent citywide. Car break-ins at 22-year lows. “For the last year, we’ve made progress making our streets safer and cleaner. This morning, walking the streets, it’s happening again downtown, and I’m so fired up about it.” He ended with his effervescent slogan: “Let’s go, San Francisco!”

A reported 57 billionaires live in the city proper, more than one for each square mile. Some belong to the old-money clans of Pacific Heights like the mayor’s, their names adorning schools, arenas, and museum wings. Then there’s the new tech money, which tended to skip past local institutions for more global ambitions: to eradicate disease, revolutionize education, experiment with basic income. “There’s not a culture in the tech world around being good civic actors and investing in home,” says a former mayoral staffer. “We always said, ‘If only we could be like New York in that way.’”

After grueling years in which San Francisco hemorrhaged business and people, those tech fortunes — built on crypto and AI and the ads sold against your clicks — are wading in to finance its rebound. Larsen is out front, pushing for a tech community that acts less like a swarm of gold-rush speculators and more like an entrenched civic and political force. A moderate Democrat in a town that breaks its elected officials into two rough teams (progressives being the other), Larsen says that for too long, tech-industry types like himself shied away from city hall. “I think it let the far left just sort of take over,” he muses, echoing the recent refrain of his political tribe. Housing was stalled and blocked; the main legislative body, the Board of Supervisors, focused on “political nonsense” (“Why is San Francisco even weighing in on international stuff as if we’re the U.N. or something?”) instead of the pragmatic business of making the city run. He argues that policies aimed at keeping police in check hamstrung their ability to fight crime at all. A live-and-let-live, “performative-bullshit freedom,” as he once put it — tolerating homelessness and public drug use — let people languish and often die in the streets.

“We love our far-left brothers and sisters, but they shouldn’t be driving the bus,” Larsen says, clearly unworried about what those brothers and sisters say in rebuke. “They just drive the bus off the cliff.” He’s confident that private wealth — through targeted philanthropy and campaign donations — can continue nudging the city in his preferred direction. “We’re all learning now that little things can go a long way,” he says. “It’s a small town.”

Growing up, Larsen, who is 65, resented the kind of figure he is today: “Just what I’d see on TV or the upper-crusty people. My dad was always very angry, and I think I caught that from him.” He was sitting in the new Ripple HQ, wearing his typical pin-striped Neapolitan Isaia suit, after apologizing for arriving a few minutes late — he’d come from a meeting with Ron Conway, the “godfather of Silicon Valley” and a long-standing player in city politics.

Larsen’s father was a union man, an airplane mechanic who often complained about banks stiffing him on loans. For pocket money, Larsen dinged out neighbors’ car dents in the driveway of the family’s San Jose home. He got a business-and-accounting degree at San Francisco State, a first-generation college student and the only one of his siblings to go. When he went to Stanford for an M.B.A., he brought class bitterness along. “I would just hate the Dartmouth people,” he says. “In my mind, I’m the state-university person, and I just assumed these people are looking down on me, so screw them.”

During the ’90s dot-com boom, Larsen founded his first start-up, E-Loan, an internet mortgage broker that was the first to allow customers to see their FICO scores. He developed a reputation for defending consumer privacy, funneling $1 million into signature gathering for a ballot measure to ban banks from sharing people’s financial information without their permission — which pressured Sacramento to pass a bill.

At a company party, he met his wife, Lyna Lam, the sister of employees whose family had fled the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. By the time Larsen had made millions at E-Loan, “I was cooling down a little” on the class-anger front. He and Lam bought a house in Russian Hill and raised two sons. He started a lending platform for people to borrow money from one another instead of a bank; during the Occupy movement, he crowdsourced lunch money for protesters and urged them to use his site. Only in his early 50s did he make the blowout bet with Ripple: a blockchain-based infrastructure for banks to move money internationally more cheaply than via traditional transfers. It propelled Larsen’s net worth to almost $2 billion by 2019, $4.3 billion by 2022, and some $12.5 billion today.

After he stepped back from his role as Ripple’s CEO to become executive chairman in 2016, Larsen’s patronage went to causes typical of the Davos tech set: climate projects, state and federal Democratic races. But the sound of breaking glass kept intruding. Larsen lived by Lombard Street, where “bipping crews,” as the local terminology goes, were smash-and-grabbing luggage from tourists’ cars, leaving a “San Francisco snow” of glass on the pavement. Violent-crime rates don’t match those of other big cities, but petty theft was a tiresome fact of life, and by then the prior criminal profile of the disheveled loner “trying to keep from getting dope-sick,” as a police lieutenant says, had evolved into organized crews in stolen cars or with stolen plates. Larsen would stroll by people casing vehicles and ask, “Can I help you?”

Up went a Nest camera in his front-yard tree. “I hate the Nest cameras,” Larsen tells me. They recorded audio, and “you realize quickly, Oh, I’m picking up people’s conversations.”

At a neighborhood meeting, Larsen listened as police explained that bipping was low risk, high reward for perpetrators. Policy typically forbade car chases for property crimes. San Francisco had strong strains of progressive protest and legal activism with a wary eye toward police, never joining the CCTV build-out of London and post-9/11 New York. The only publicly owned cameras were run by a mishmash of local agencies, not the cops. Footage was grainy and often failed to solve cases. At the Russian Hill meeting, police said citizens handing over private porch-cam footage of crimes could help.

Larsen called a private camera company and paid to post networked cameras on the homes of willing neighbors. He toured a web of........

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