Representative Ro Khanna has long managed to pull off a seemingly impossible task in his Silicon Valley district: backing the tech industry and Bernie Sanders progressivism at the same time.
But now he is starting to feel the squeeze.
Mr. Khanna, an ambitious 49-year-old Democrat seen as a possible 2028 presidential candidate, has publicly defended a proposed one-time wealth tax in California that has angered some of the state’s richest executives and prompted threats that they will flee.
Some of those wealthy Californians are now quietly mobilizing on WhatsApp chats and conference calls to try to put together a well-funded but long-shot bid to oust Mr. Khanna, according to half a dozen people close to the effort who spoke on the condition of anonymity to disclose private conversations.
The effort is unlikely to succeed: Mr. Khanna, whose profile rose as he helped lead the push for the release of the Epstein files, easily won re-election in 2024 and has loyal support from his district’s South Asian community. He sits on almost $15 million in campaign cash that even a candidate backed by wealthy tech donors would struggle to compete against.
But the anger toward him — ignited mainly by a social media post mocking billionaires who are planning to leave the state over the wealth tax proposal — reflects the tense relationship between Silicon Valley and the Democratic Party, particularly its progressive wing.
Some tech leaders believe they may have found an anti-Khanna candidate in Ethan Agarwal, a Democrat and little-known start-up founder who has been waging a bid for governor that has failed to gain traction.
Mr. Agarwal confirmed to The New York Times that he was “seriously considering challenging” Mr. Khanna, largely because of the proposed wealth tax ballot measure, which would require California residents worth more than $1 billion to pay a 5 percent tax on their assets over five years. Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, opposes the measure.
Warning that the measure “would end up destroying jobs and opportunity,” Mr. Agarwal said of Mr. Khanna, “The people of his district, Silicon Valley and California need someone working for them full time, not working to win over the Democratic Socialist vote in a future presidential primary.”
Mr. Khanna has suggested that the tax measure, which labor unions are trying to place on the ballot in November, is needed to fund health care programs in the state.
In his now-viral post from late last month, he mocked Peter Thiel and other billionaires who are angry about the tax proposal, writing, “I echo what FDR said with sarcasm of economic royalists when they threatened to leave, ‘I will miss them very much.’”
In an interview, he said the post had come off the cuff as he read a Times article during a holiday celebration at a family member’s home. “I’m surprised that one tweet did touch a nerve,” he said. (He later posted a lengthier explanation of why he supports the tax measure.)
“I’ve had constructive conversations since, with many technology leaders, explaining my view that there has to be a balance between asking people who have done extraordinarily well to pay more and making sure that the Silicon Valley ecosystem remains vibrant,” he added.
Mr. Khanna said he had not heard of Mr. Agarwal. “It’s a democracy,” he said. “It’s rare that I don’t have competition.”
Mr. Khanna’s rift with some tech leaders is striking given how he rose to Congress. A lawyer in the Bay Area for tech companies, he was the favorite of industry heavyweights, such as Sheryl Sandberg and Marc Benioff, as he made an unsuccessful bid for the House in 2014 and then ousted an incumbent Democrat in 2016.
Now, as the tech industry veers to the right, some of its leaders are publicly raging against him.
A loose constellation of Silicon Valley executives have held conversations with associates in recent days about how to best challenge him, people briefed on the talks said. Those executives include Garry Tan, the head of the influential start-up accelerator Y Combinator and the investor Sheel Mohnot.
Those efforts by Silicon Valley leaders and allied interest groups have included encouraging potential challengers to run and sketching out plans for a new outside spending effort to oppose Mr. Khanna, the people said.
Mr. Agarwal has a limited public profile and is a backup choice for some tech leaders only after failed attempts to recruit Mayor Matt Mahan of San Jose, who is a favorite of tech executives like Mr. Tan and who opposes the tax proposal. Mr. Mahan said in an interview that he had recently been approached by several “significant leaders in the tech industry,” whom he declined to name, asking him to consider challenging Mr. Khanna.
“I am not interested in doing that,” Mr. Mahan said. “I’ve been very direct with everyone. I think I have the best job in the world.”
Some tech leaders have also approached Eric Jones, a Democratic congressional candidate in a district north of San Francisco, but he is uninterested, according to a person close to him.
Other tech leaders are instead channeling their energy toward heading off the wealth tax proposal itself. In an email marked “confidential” to Silicon Valley donors and seen by The Times, the tech billionaire Ron Conway said he was helping lead a “serious effort coming together to defeat it.”
“I am confident that with Governor Newsom’s staunch opposition and a robust, well-funded campaign, we can defeat this measure when we inform voters of the true consequences for California,” wrote Mr. Conway, who has given $100,000 to the effort.
Any challenger would need to move quickly in part because of a March 6 paperwork deadline. And Mr. Khanna would not be “primaried” in the traditional sense: In California elections, the top two finishers in a first round of balloting advance to a November runoff.
There could be an upside from the conflict for Mr. Khanna. In a fund-raising email last weekend, he told his small-dollar supporters that he needed money because billionaires “are openly threatening to bankroll a primary challenger against me.”
Allies of Mr. Khanna, who served as co-chair of Senator Bernie Sanders’s 2020 presidential campaign and wrote a 2022 book titled “Progressive Capitalism: How to Make Tech Work for All of Us,” say that a prolonged fight with tech executives could endear him to left-wing voters who are suspicious of his ties to the industry.
Mr. Khanna’s critics are not having it.
“I feel sorry for him, actually,” said Paul Graham, a leading investor who co-founded Y Combinator and squabbled with Mr. Khanna about the tax over the holidays. “I don’t think he had any idea what a land mine he was stepping on.”
Theodore Schleifer is a Times reporter covering billionaires and their impact on the world.
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