'Benioff also criticized Stripe, a payment platform and another major San Francisco tech firm opposing Prop C. The company claimed the measure lacked a “comprehensive plan” for spending in a recent op-ed and has also given more than $400,000 to a campaign fighting the measure, making it the largest donor.'<p>As a company with deep connections to HN, I for one hope that the Stripe staff active here are doing everything they can to challenge this embarrassing activity by their company. A good start would be to publicly express your opinion about this sort of lobbying here on HN.<p>These companies benefit hugely from government subsidies in various forms, and really the least they could do is abstain from using their tremendous power and resources to manipulate the government into making decisions that favor their bottom lines.<p>The Stripe founders are entitled to whatever backwards, selfish position they want to take, but they shouldn't be spending $400,000 on behalf of the company (a community of people) to try to buy a given policy outcome.<p>More broadly, it's sad that even the progressive mayor feels the need to make policy decisions based on fear that massively wealthy tech firms will punish the city if they ask them to pay a slightly fairer share of shared expenses. What we need is a cultural change, away from "anything that drives profit is justifiable" to "successful companies that side with their own profits against the public interest should be ashamed."