The First Estate of Silicon Valley (here, including San Francisco) are the highly influential angels, VCs, and corporate executives who can force acquisitions. The Second Estate are the engineers, mid-level product managers, and data scientists. The Third Estate is everyone else. Naturally, the First Estate is trying to prevent any chance of alliance between the Second and Third Estate, and actively encourages tension between the those two groups. It's also clear, however, that the First Estate screws the Second (all of the collusion/anti-poach agreements that have been uncovered). In fact, the Second and Third Estates have a common enemy in the First. They've just been prevented from realizing it, in large part, by all the obfuscation that's going on.
To people in poverty, $120,000 per year is a large amount of money, but it's not nearly enough to bribe city councils into enacting the NIMBY policies that make San Francisco unaffordable.
The real bad guys don't ride Google buses. They have private drivers, and the Google buses don't stop on Sand Hill Road.