Tom Steyer runs for California governor on class traitor platform: ‘I’m the billionaire who wants to tax other billionaires’
Tom Steyer, the $2.4 billion climate hedge-funder, now campaigns as the billionaire who will tax other billionaires, yet his own record shows the contradictions wealth can’t quite escape.
Tom Steyer is pitching himself as California’s ultimate class traitor: a man worth $2.4 billion who promises to make other rich people and corporations pay more while solving the state’s housing costs, climate targets, and battles with the Trump administration.
He leans into the tension. After building Farallon Capital Management into one of the world’s largest hedge funds with stakes in fossil fuels, Steyer spent millions defending California’s greenhouse gas reduction law in 2010 and has poured more than $62 million into state ballot measures. His favorite line: “I’m the billionaire who wants to tax other billionaires.” Yet he offers only “tenuous backing” to the actual billionaires’ tax on the November ballot.
Progressives are buying the act. Our Revolution, the group founded by Bernie Sanders that says billionaires shouldn’t exist, has endorsed him. State Assemblyman Alex Lee, chair of the progressive caucus, swallowed his hesitation because Steyer “became wealthy in his lifetime but didn’t go off and become Zuckerberg level.” Steyer also backs single-payer health care, a perennial progressive wish that has repeatedly failed in Sacramento.
The business community isn’t convinced. Pacific Gas & Electric dropped $10 million to defeat him, and the California Chamber of Commerce warns his agenda “will cost billions, driving investment out of California and worsening the state’s affordability crisis.” Rival Katie Porter reminded debate viewers that Steyer “made the billions that you’re using to fund your campaign off fossil fuels.” His reply: business groups opposing him proves “I’m for real.”
Steyer has spent nearly 30 times more on ads than his nearest Democratic opponent, a pattern longtime Sacramento Republican strategist Rob Stutzman calls classic self-promotion. In 2020 Steyer burned through $24 million in South Carolina alone, finished third, and watched his presidential bid collapse under the same billionaire critique he now courts. This time the pitch lands better with the left, yet the contradictions remain: a former coal-and-oil investor vowing to break up utility monopolies and defend cap-and-trade.
Whether money finally buys the governor’s office in America’s largest state economy will be clear after the June 2 primary. For now Steyer’s campaign is less a resolution of his own paradoxes than a reminder that even self-described traitors to their class still play the game with the fortune they made inside it.
Original reporting: Fortune.
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