Saikat Chakrabarti, who is running against Democrat leader Nancy Pelosi to represent San Francisco in the US Congress, has criticised Hakeem Jeffries and other Democrat leaders whom he believes have “failed the party.”
In an interview with news outlet Zeteo on Monday, Chakrabarti said he thinks Jeffries has “failed as leader for the Democratic Party” and that he will not support Jeffries if elected to Congress.
Chakrabarti also said that Hakeem Jeffries “should be primaried.” “I am going to be calling for people to primary all the Democrats who have completely failed this party,” he said.
Sharing a clip of the interview on his X account, he wrote, “It’s not just me. Nearly 80 people running for Congress declined to support Jeffries for leader. We need new people to run across the country to completely rebuild this party to be one that can stop an authoritarian coup and build an economy that works for working people.”
Who is Saikat Chakrabarti?
Saikat Chakrabarti is a Harvard University graduate in computer science who later turned to progressive politics. In a video on his X account, Chakrabarti said he moved to San Francisco in 2009 after college because he has “always been in love with the idea of the city.”
He added that he has worked in progressive politics “for the past decade or so.”
He worked on Bernie Sanders’ 2016 presidential campaign and founded the group Justice Democrats in 2017, which “recruited progressive candidates all across the country to run for Congress.”
Chakrabarti also helped lead Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s successful 2018 campaign for Congress and served as her Chief of Staff in 2019.
Chakrabarti began his campaign for Congress in February this year, challenging Pelosi, who is running for her 21st term.
Criticising her leadership, his campaign website says, “she was a fighter who joined Congress in 1987 — but she does not understand the anti-Democratic, anti-Constitution, and anti-American forces that we are up against in 2025. And at age 85, she no longer has the strength for the current fight.”
Chakrabarti has been a controversial figure in the Democratic Party. In 2019, while serving as Ocasio-Cortez’s chief of staff, he faced criticism for his social media posts.
He accused centrist Democrats of harming minority communities and, in one now-deleted tweet, compared them to segregation-era Southern Democrats.
By challenging Pelosi, Chakrabarti is positioning himself as part of the younger, progressive wing of the party that is pushing for new leadership and change within the Democratic establishment.
What is Saikat Chakrabarti’s net worth?
Chakrabarti is best known in politics for serving as the campaign manager and first chief of staff for Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York.
Years before that, he was a founding engineer at Stripe, which is how he became wealthy.
“After I helped build the payment processing company Stripe, I became a centimillionaire — at least on paper,” Chakrabarti told Business Insider in an email.
“It was a shocking and weird experience, and of course, I feel incredibly lucky. But it’s also given me a window into how wealth inequality works in America and just how unfair it is.”
Chakrabarti’s disclosure indicates that he is worth at least $167 million and does not have any liabilities. The bulk of his wealth comes from equity in Stripe and a Fidelity investment fund that primarily holds US government securities.
In both cases, Chakrabarti was only required to say that each asset is worth more than $50 million. Much of his wealth is held across scores of other investment funds.
He has earned at least $16 million in investment income since the beginning of 2024, while the Pelosis earned at least $8.9 million in 2024 from investment and rental income.
Chakrabarti’s wealth has allowed him to largely self-fund his campaign so far. The latest publicly available Federal Election Commission records show that 75% of the money in his campaign account has come from personal loans he has made to the campaign.
