Tech Billionaires’ Sneaky Plan for an Utopian City Is Already Backfiring

The tech billionaires who hid behind anonymity and nondisclosure agreements for six years while buying 62,000 acres in northern California to build some kind of utopian city have received a lesson in the importance of trust.

The lesson came on Monday evening as the Rio Vista City Council in Solano County considered an application for a conflict of interest waiver submitted by the law firm that represented the municipality for more than a decade.

Kronick, Moskovitz, Tiedemann, and Girard was seeking to also represent the land-grabbing billionaires’ concern, which recently...