Above, a sight that will not be visible from Flannery Associates’ new city. | Photo by Tayfun Coskun / Anadolu Agency via Getty Images
Over the past five years, a company named Flannery Associates has spent $800 million scooping up land outside San Francisco — without explaining who’s behind the effort or what they plan to do with the land. Now, local officials who’d been looking into the matter finally have their answer: a group of wealthy and recognizable tech leaders are behind the venture, and they’re hoping to use the land to build a brand new city, according to reports from The New York Times and Bloomberg.
The reports say that LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, Andreessen Horowitz investors Marc Andreessen and Chris Dixon, former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman, Emerson Collective founder Laurene Powell Jobs, and other tech leaders and investors have put money into the…