Grindr CEO George Arison tries to avoid discussing politics. But he and the popular gay dating app he leads are making a play for influence both in Sacramento and Washington. Grindr recently announced it washosting a buzzy party as part of this year’s White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner weekend. And now Arison, like many of California’s tech executives, is backing San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan to be the next governor. Mahan, a moderate Democrat, is making anaggressive fundraising and advertising push after Eric Swalwell dropped out of the governor’s race and resigned from Congress amid allegations of sexual assault. Arison, however, says he’s been a fan of Mahan for years. The longtime Bay Area resident sent Mahan’s campaign a $7,000 check this week and expressed his increasing frustration with the state’s direction in an interview with POLITICO Magazine. “I like living here for professional reasons. I like living here for the environment,” Arison said, echoing sentiments from a politically reawakened Silicon Valley. “But I hate living here for the fact that we have a state government that is quite bigger than the one a decade ago that provides less services.” Grindr has been a California-based company since it was founded in Los Angeles in 2009 and remains headquartered in West Hollywood, despite atumultuous stint under Chinese ownership. Since Arison became CEO in 2022, he’s wanted to remake the dating app into an AI-focused company by applying automation to its troves of data. Grindr began rolling out some of those AI features for paid users this year. “I got excited about this job because I knew AI was going to become very big,” said Arison, who previously co-founded the startup Pulsar AI. He added that Grindr’s advantage was having “all the users and then also the data.” When it comes to AI regulation, Arison favors the Trump administration’s light-touch strategy over Sacramento’s ideas for overseeing risks posed by advanced models, like its landmark safety and transparency law SB 53. He is vehemently against a data center moratorium or ban, blasting its proponents as “demagogues.” Arison, who once faced online backlash after describing himself as a conservative, also called recent suggestions from OpenAI to establish a public wealth fund and incentivize 32-hour workweek pilot programs to deal with disruption from AI “ridiculous.” The AI labs, he said, “are full of people who are not capitalists.” The following conversation was edited for length… [TheTopNews] Read More.
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