Tom Steyer: The Cali billionaire running from his – Latest News
Tom Steyer hopes you forgot.He needs to be California’s subsequent governor, and he’s relying on voters to miss how he made the fortune he now makes use of to lecture them.Of course he’s running. In California political circles, everybody assumed he’d leap in sooner or later.
But the actual story isn’t his entry into the race — it’s the a long time he spent serving to create the affordability disaster he now guarantees to repair.
You wouldn’t know that from the glowing headline in my hometown paper: “Billionaire environmentalist Tom Steyer announces run for California governor.”
Not one point out of how he truly made his money.Let’s be sincere: Steyer didn’t make his huge fortune preventing fossil fuels.
He made it increasing fossil fuels.As the founder and longtime head of Farallon Capital, Steyer oversaw billions in coal, oil, fuel, pipeline, and private-prison investments.
These weren’t passive buys buried in an index fund. They had been focused, high-return offers he reviewed, accepted, and profited from.
Farallon helped fund more than $2 billion in coal acquisitions in Indonesia and Australia, enabling huge manufacturing will increase.
The fund additionally invested closely in Nexen (oil sands), McMoRan (offshore drilling), and Kinder Morgan (pipelines) — whereas Steyer later campaigned loudly towards Keystone XL.
And he pocketed money from Corrections Corporation of America earlier than reinventing himself as a criminal-justice reformer.
That’s not conscience. That’s comfort.
Only after stepping away from Farallon — and after years of cashing the checks — did Steyer rebrand himself as an environmental savior.
But whereas he polished his image, he was pushing insurance policies that raised prices for tens of millions of Californians.
In 2010, he helped defeat Proposition 23, locking within the state’s cap-and-tax climate regime underneath AB 32.
At the time, California electrical energy charges had been roughly 25% above the national average. Today, they’re about 80% increased.
You don’t need a PhD to attach these dots.Gas as soon as price about 30 cents more per gallon right here. Now the hole is round $1.40.
And the anti-oil agenda Steyer championed helped drive two extra refineries out of the state this yr — a blow to provide that just about ensures increased costs.
Manufacturing? California has shed roughly 30,000 jobs since Steyer’s climate imaginative and prescient took maintain, whereas the remainder of America added more than a million.
Housing prices soared as environmental mandates throttled suburban development.
And Steyer’s 2012 corporate-tax initiative made it more durable for corporations to flee California’s high-tax atmosphere, which solely accelerated their choice to maneuver operations elsewhere.
Now he says he needs to repair affordability.
Steyer’s marketing campaign video complains about high utility payments, costly housing and underperforming faculties — all issues pushed partly by the insurance policies he pushed.
Then he trots out the acquainted system: raise taxes on companies, develop state control and demand that this time authorities will magically get it proper.
And final week, whereas selling his affordability message, he added a flourish: “The richest people in America think that they earned everything themselves. That’s bulls–t. That’s so ridiculous.”
Strong phrases from a man price roughly $1.6 billion — wealth constructed, again, in coal, oil, drilling, pipelines and personal prisons.
Boiled down, his message is: I helped break California. Elect me to repair it.
The 2026 Democratic discipline is already skinny: a former Cabinet official, a present and ex-members of Congress, and statewide politicians whose careers run by the identical public-employee-union pipeline.
Gavin Newsom is just too busy sprucing his 2028 storyline to pay a lot consideration to the state he at present governs.
And now Steyer — who burned practically $200 million on a presidential run that earned him zero delegates — is back with a plaid shirt, a slick video, and enough money to drown the airwaves from San Francisco to San Diego.
He has assets.
He has consultants desperate to burn by them.
What he doesn’t have is a credible reply to the central query: Why ought to Californians trust a man who made his fortune within the fossil fuel industry, as he channels his inside Greta Thunberg?Steyer isn’t the reformer he claims to be.His largest drawback isn’t his message — it’s the mirror.
Jon Fleischman, a longtime strategist in California politics, writes at SoDoesItMatter.com.
