The $100 Tip and the $1 Million Dollar Bribe
$100 for his community. $1,000,000 to keep us down
Tony Xu is a billionaire. CEO of DoorDash. Founding Board Member of Gold House. Board Director at Meta.
When anti-Asian hate crimes surged in 2021, I helped launch Stand with Asian Americans (my former nonprofit) — a national call-to-action to end anti-Asian violence against the community. One simple headline: Enough.
We asked Tony for support. He gave us $100.
Not $100,000.
Not $10,000.
Just $100.
About what you’d tip a Dasher to bring lunch for your board meeting. Ironically, many of those Dashers were among the 8,000+ people who signed our Open Letter.
And even after that gift, Tony Xu and DoorDash wouldn’t be the subject of this post — except he just spent $1,000,000 trying to help elect a man who sexually harassed more than a dozen women while they were working. Andrew Cuomo.
This is where we are: billionaires dropping a hundred bucks to “defend” their community while writing million-dollar checks to buy politicians who’ll protect their bottom line.
And Tony, if you stumble across this. Putting money into politics is fine, but make it your personal money (I do) — not corporate. I know you’d hold that money to a higher ethical bar and the real opportunity cost of those dollars. 💵
TL;DR
Tony Xu tipped his community $100 but spent $1 million buying a mayor to protect DoorDash’s exploitative model built on low-cost, immigrant labor. 🥡
I was part of the gig economy at age 8 — rolling newspapers at 2:30am as an “independent contractor.” It’s the same story today, just scaled by apps. And it’s wrong.
Uber, Lyft & DoorDash spent hundreds of millions 💰 on Prop 22 and Cuomo — democracy for sale, made legal by the deeply flawed Supreme Court decision: Citizens United. Unlimited corporate money in politics is ruining our country.
But New Yorkers said enough. ✊ A 33-year-old Zohran Mamdani out-organized the billionaires. If we want more wins like that, it’s time to get social, get organized, and get to work.
“Wendy, wake up.”
It’s 2:30 in the morning. I’m eight years old when I feel my mom tap my shoulder, telling me it’s time to get up and go to work.
I count to ten and roll out of bed. Waking up mid sleep-cycle sucks. But I don’t make it hard for my mom — I know she feels bad enough already.
I pull on a yellow hoodie, barely brush my teeth, and climb into our old Chrysler minivan. We drive through the darkness to the Knight Ridder warehouse on Curtner Ave in San Jose.
That’s where sixty or so Vietnamese refugee families gather before dawn breaks. A few Hispanic families too. All of us immigrants, all scraping by on whatever work we can get.
After the War, most Vietnamese families left everything behind. No English skills meant no decent jobs — so you take what you can. For us, it started with my brothers: they got a paper route, tossing newspapers on their bikes. It brought in a little extra cash — up to $1,000 a month, which was enough to pay rent.
But after a while, getting up at 4am and throwing papers in the rain lost its charm for them. The money still mattered though. So it was left to us — me and my mom.
This isn’t some cute immigrant hustle story. It’s an old story about how capitalism exploits working people when they have no other option.
Knight Ridder, owner of the San Jose Mercury News, knew exactly how much we depended on that money. So they made everyone an "independent contractor." They charged us for rubber bands and rain bags. They docked our pay if a customer didn’t pay their bill.
The risk was all ours. The profit was all theirs.
That’s how I spent six years of my childhood: rain or shine, sick or sleepless, rolling newspapers in the back of that warehouse at three in the morning and on the off night someone left their Dobermans out, it would get interesting. Or should I say terrifying.
And here’s the thing: it’s not old tale. It’s the same story playing out now, scaled up and dressed in tech.
DoorDash, Uber, Lyft — they’ve perfected what Knight Ridder did to families like mine. Work without benefits. Labor with no floor. Contractors who carry all the risk while the billionaires keep the reward.
In New York City, being a delivery worker is still infamously dangerous. In 2023 alone, at least 33 NYC delivery workers were killed on the job.
That’s the real gig economy. And that’s what Tony Xu’s million-dollar donation is buying.
This is what I see when people call it innovation. It’s not new — it’s just my childhood, scaled.
The worst part. Tony’s mom washed dishes when they first got to America. A physician in China who couldn’t practice in the US.
But some people run from their past while others embrace it.
DoorDash, Uber, Lyft exploitation of Labor
Once Big Tech realized you could create double-sided marketplaces and skim a cut off every transaction, the exploitation went national.
In California, DoorDash, Uber, and Lyft pulled off one of the biggest political heists in recent memory. Workers and unions fought to get AB5 passed — a simple rule that said if you drive full time for these companies, they have to treat you like an employee: fair pay, benefits, protections.
But the gig-economy companies couldn’t have that.
So they spent over $200 million on Prop 22 — the most expensive ballot measure in California’s history — to carve themselves out of the law.
That’s what happens when billionaires get to treat democracy like another line item on their expense report. It’s the world Citizen’s United made possible — when the Supreme Court told corporations they were people too, and money was free speech. And they could spend unlimited money ruining our country.
But here’s the truth. If companies were people, they’d be sociopaths: they lie, they cheat, they cause opioid addiction (hello, Purdue Pharma and McKinsey), they treat people inhumanely. In short, they have no conscience.
And there’s an even deeper truth: we’ve all been taught to leave our humanity at the door when we go to work. That our job is to grow stakeholder value.
But what if that loyalty to the investor class is breaking the backs of our own communities?
A No-Name 33 year old Beats the Establishment
In New York City, Tony Xu’s DoorDash and the landlord lobby poured millions into Andrew Cuomo’s comeback bid. They thought they could bury us in ads, mailers, and Super PAC spin.
But they didn’t count on the same people they’ve been squeezing — tenants, immigrants, gig workers — being done with it. And they didn’t count on some class traitors / allies in Brooklyn and Upper Manhattan either.
Zohran Mamdani, a 33-year-old mortgage counselor from Queens who spent his days helping immigrant families keep their homes, just beat the machine in the Democratic primary.
And it’s a lesson the Left better take seriously: stop running old, tired, unethical politicians. We’re done with it.
Yes — we’d rather take a chance on someone young who will knock on a million doors than watch another candidate raise a million dollars from special interests.
Are all his ideas perfect? No, but help mentor the future. Don't stay stuck in the past.
☎️ It’s time for action. Call your Senators and Representatives.
It's time to organize, people. 1 million strong. Then 100 million strong.
We are in the middle of a full-throttled battled happening right now over the Budget Bill with healthcare, free lunches for hungry kids and clean energy on the line.
Pick up the phone. Call your Representative. Call your Senator.
Remind them who they work for — and what happens if they forget.
Zohran’s win shows billionaires don’t get the last word if we show up.
Want to see more billboards in their backyard? Want to remind them again and again?
💵 Help us do it: asianamericansrise.com/donate
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