Creator of Gmail makes one of Calif. governor's race’s biggest donations

Matt Mahan, San Jose’s mayor and an upstart candidate in California’s crowded governor’s race, has added another deep-pocketed techie to his roster of supporters: the creator of Gmail.

Paul Buchheit, who made his name building the iconic email platform as an early employee at Google, recently gave a whopping $1 million to support Mahan’s campaign, according to a Friday filing. The donation is one of the largest yet in the wide-open battle to replace Gavin Newsom.

The money comes at the right time for Mahan. Though he’s led the state’s third-largest city since 2023, he’s on a sprint to gain name recognition before June’s open primary pushes the top two vote-getters, regardless of party, on to the general election. In an early February poll from the Public Policy Institute of California, just 3% of voters picked Mahan. The poll’s top line included Republicans Steve Hilton and Chad Bianco and Democrats Katie Porter, Eric Swalwell and Tom Steyer. No candidate topped 15%.

Along with his $1 million gift to the PAC supporting Mahan, Buchheit was one of many tech standouts to give his campaign one or two gifts of $39,200, the maximum amount an individual can give directly to a candidate for each the primary and general election. Mahan also received donations from Google co-founder Sergey Brin, DoorDash CEO Tony Xu, Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale and Cruise co-founder Kyle Vogt, as well as venture capitalists Michael Moritz, Garry Tan and Reid Hoffman. 

Mahan opposes the proposed billionaire wealth tax that has riled up Silicon Valley leaders, and he pushes a message of fiscal responsibility. He stopped by Y Combinator, the startup accelerator run by his outspoken backer Tan, for a campaign stop in February.

Another PAC supporting Mahan lists Twitch co-founder Michael Seibel as one of its top donors. The San Jose Spotlight reported that he gave $1 million to the PAC, which funded a 30-second Super Bowl ad for Mahan highlighting his record on public safety and home construction. 

Buchheit hasn’t posted in his own words about the candidate. But in January, he reposted X posts praising Mahan, which said, “He is a fighter, a hard worker, someone who built 1000 shelter beds in San Jose and got homeless into treatment,” and “No more taxes until we clean up the fraud, waste and abuse in California.”

Before the Gmail creator donated more than $100,000 to moderate causes in San Francisco’s 2024 elections, he hadn’t given to state political campaigns, filings show. 

Buchheit spent about 2.5 years working on the email platform before launching it in 2004, he wrote on his blog, and “was told that we would never get a million users.” The app is now the world’s most popular email service and one of the most widely used tech products ever made. He’s also credited with coining Google’s “Don’t be evil” motto and invests at the venture firm Standard Capital.

Buchheit, in a 2024 interview with the tech outlet Pirate Wires, cast Gmail as an “insurgent” fighting against “gatekeepers” — a model he also used to skewer California.

“In California, all we have is gatekeepers, right?” Buchheit said. “You can’t build a bus lane or a bathroom or something like that because there’s a long line of gatekeepers and the gatekeepers extract some sort of power, whether it’s money or influence or something.”

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