San Francisco developer, Examiner owner Clint Reilly dies at 79

Clint Reilly, the San Francisco developer, publisher and political strategist who bought the San Francisco Examiner and restored landmark downtown buildings, died at 79, leaving behind a career that reached from City Hall to the Financial District.

Reilly became the sixth owner of the Examiner when he acquired the paper from Black Press in January 2021, in a deal that also included SF Weekly. At the time, he said he wanted The Examiner to be leading San Francisco’s comeback, a pledge that tied his media ambitions to a city still struggling with downtown vacancies, a battered newspaper business and a shrinking civic center.

His influence in San Francisco was never confined to one lane. Reilly was a longtime power broker and former mayoral candidate who built a political career in California before becoming a downtown property owner, publisher and philanthropist. He restored historic buildings including the Merchants Exchange Building in the Financial District, placing his name on a corner of the city’s preservation fights as surely as on its political networks.

Reilly was born Jan. 13, 1947, in Oakland and raised in the East Bay as the son of a milkman, one of nine children. He studied at Saint Patrick’s Seminary in Menlo Park, earned a bachelor’s degree in philosophy, and left the seminary three years before he would have been ordained a priest. Those early years far from downtown San Francisco contrasted with the role he later played in shaping it.

His personal and family life remained intertwined with his public profile. Reilly married Janet in 1995, and the couple had a daughter, Jill Margaret Reilly. Together, Clint and Janet Reilly were recognized in 2021 with the University of San Francisco’s Leo T. McCarthy Center Award for Public Service and were later inducted into the Bay Area Business Hall of Fame.

Reilly’s real estate portfolio extended beyond the Examiner and the Merchants Exchange. In 2024, he sold one of his two Sea Cliff homes for $14.5 million while keeping the neighboring house, another sign of the wealth that accompanied his rise through San Francisco’s business and political circles. His legacy now sits across the city in its preserved facades, its media ownership history and the enduring power networks he helped build.