The “evil billionaire” noise about Tom Steyer started the same week I’d tentatively marked him as my best option in the 2026 California governor’s race. Perfect timing. So I did what I do: followed the money in both directions. I went looking for receipts to sink him, and I found some. I found a $90 million hedge-fund investment in a private prison company. I found coal mines clearing koala habitat while he was posing as a climate activist. I found his own bank suing 1,800 low-income borrowers over subprime auto loans. I found $6 million in 2024 passive income routed through Cayman Islands and Bermuda entities. Real receipts. All documented. All worth knowing.
Then I found out who was paying for the attack ads.
The prison guards’ union is running attack ads against Tom Steyer because he once profited from private prisons. [1][2][3] The California Correctional Peace Officers Association, whose members draw paychecks from the mass incarceration of human beings, is spending money to destroy a candidate for the sin of having done something similar, more profitably, twenty years ago. This is not moral concern. This is turf protection. PG&E, the utility Steyer has promised to break apart, is spending $10 million to make sure that never happens. The California Association of Realtors, which opposes his housing plan, added $5 million more.
When your enemies are PG&E and the prison guards’ union, you are threatening the right people. That’s not an endorsement. It’s a data point. And it changes the question entirely.
The question isn’t whether Tom Steyer’s past is clean. It isn’t. Nobody in this race is clean. The question is who he threatens and who he doesn’t, and what that pattern reveals about what kind of governor he’d actually be. This is my attempt to answer that honestly, with receipts, because that’s the only way any of this is worth reading.
Who’s Paying for the Attack Ads — And What That Tells You
A PAC called “California Is Not for Sale” has spent at least $14 million attacking Steyer specifically. [1][2][3] The donors are PG&E, the California Association of Realtors, the Building Industry Association, and the California Correctional Peace Officers Association. Steyer’s campaign has filed a complaint with the Fair Political Practices Commission alleging that PG&E laundered its contributions through pass-through committees. [2] Whether or not that complaint lands, the donor list is the point.
PG&E is spending $10 million against a candidate who has promised to break up investor-owned utilities and cut electricity bills by 25 percent. The California Association of Realtors is spending $5 million against a candidate who has pledged to build 1 million homes in four years. The Building Industry Association opposes his zoning and construction reforms. The prison guards’ union, which has spent four decades blocking every criminal justice reform in California, doesn’t want a governor who has called for abolishing ICE and prosecuting federal agents for racial profiling.
These organizations are not worried about Steyer’s character. They are worried about his platform. The distinction matters when you’re trying to figure out whether an attack campaign reflects genuine criticism or coordinated self-preservation. Both can be true at once. His Farallon record is real. The attack money is also a tell. Hold both things.
The California prison guards' union is running ads attacking Tom Steyer for his past prison investments. Think carefully about who funds attack ads and why. These are not people concerned about working-class welfare.
The Farallon Record — We’re Not Skipping This
Tom Steyer founded Farallon Capital Management in 1986 and ran it until 2012, growing it from $15 million to more than $20 billion in assets under management. [10] During that period the fund made decisions that deserve direct scrutiny, not deflection.
The private prison investment. Farallon invested approximately $90 million in Corrections Corporation of America, now CoreCivic, which currently operates ICE detention facilities across the United States. [7][8] Steyer says he personally ordered the investment sold in 2006 and calls it a mistake. That is the kind of mistake you make, then profit from for years before naming it one. The investment happened. The returns happened. The remorse arrived considerably later.
The coal operations. A 2014 investigation found that Farallon-financed coal operations increased coal production by roughly 70 million tons per year. [11] Farallon held stakes in Australia’s Maules Creek coal mine, which cleared more than 1,600 hectares of the Leard State Forest, including koala habitat and 545 hectares of endangered white box grassy woodland. This was happening while Steyer was publicly presenting himself as a climate champion. That is not a footnote. It’s a contradiction that deserves to be named.
Beneficial State Bank. Steyer and his wife Kat Taylor founded Beneficial State Bank in 2007 as a mission-driven community development bank. Its profits flow to a nonprofit foundation rather than to Steyer personally, and it has financed more than 17,000 affordable housing units. It also acquired Pan American Bank in 2016 and inherited a subprime auto loan portfolio with interest rates up to approximately 28 percent. The bank filed lawsuits against approximately 1,800 low-income borrowers before restructuring the program in early 2018. [14] A community development bank built to serve working-class Californians spent two years suing them first.
The offshore income. Steyer and Taylor reported $39 million in joint income in 2024 and paid $5.4 million in federal taxes. [12][13] He also reported $6 million in passive income from entities in Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Bermuda, and the Cayman Islands. A man running on taxing billionaires maintains passive income structures in the exact jurisdictions designed to shelter billionaire wealth from taxation. That tension exists and this post is not going to paper over it.
These are real receipts. They are also being weaponized by a $14 million campaign funded by utilities, prison guards, realtors, and the building industry. Both things are true simultaneously.
The Conversion — Documented, Not Just Claimed
Steyer left Farallon in 2012 and immediately started spending on climate and voter registration at a scale that went well beyond reputation laundering. He poured more than $200 million into those causes over the following decade. [10] His NextGen America operation registered approximately 1.5 million young voters. He bankrolled Proposition 39 in 2012, which closed a corporate tax loophole on out-of-state companies, and it passed. He put $30 million of his own money in.
In 2022 he supported Proposition 30, a 1.75% income surtax on Californians earning over $2 million, directed at EV infrastructure and wildfire response. Gavin Newsom personally filmed the only opposition TV ad of his gubernatorial year against it, branding it a “Trojan horse” for Lyft’s corporate interests. [28] Newsom sided with Silicon Valley venture capitalists against a tax on his donor class. The measure failed. What the fight told you was whose side Newsom was on, and it wasn’t the side of Californians breathing smoke and paying PG&E bills.
In December 2025, Steyer recorded a video explicitly reversing his 2019 opposition to single-payer healthcare. His exact words: “In 2019, I didn’t think we needed single-payer health care. Boy was I wrong, and boy was Bernie right.” [15][16] He endorsed CalCare. The California Nurses Association endorsed him back. Our Revolution, Bernie Sanders’ political organization and the largest independent progressive grassroots network in the country, endorsed him in April 2026. [17] Congressman Ro Khanna endorsed him. Bill McKibben endorsed him.
At the May 2026 CNN debate, Steyer was the only candidate on stage who committed to signing the SEIU-UHW billionaire wealth tax if voters pass it in November. [5] That initiative would impose a one-time 5% tax on net assets over $1 billion. Based on Forbes estimates of his $4.75 billion net worth, signing it would cost him approximately $237 million personally. [4][6][34] He says he’d vote yes. He is the only top-tier candidate in this race proposing to make himself pay.
“I’m the billionaire who wants to tax other billionaires.” — Tom Steyer, April 2026 [4]
On AIPAC: Steyer publicly called it “a dark money organization that should have no place in our politics,” lost an endorsement over it, and named “Trump and Netanyahu’s war” as the cause of gas price increases for Californians. [18][35] His underlying position is a conditional two-state framework, not BDS. But he is the only viable candidate in this race who has named AIPAC as the corrupting influence it is, by name, on camera, and accepted the political consequences.
The cynical read is that all of this is repositioning by a man who spent $253 million on a 2020 presidential campaign, collected zero delegates, and is moving further left in 2026 because there’s no other lane available. Maybe. The evidence-based read is that something documented happened between 2012 and today. SEIU California, the California Nurses Association, the California Federation of Teachers, AFSCME 3299, UNITE HERE, IATSE, and Our Revolution all had every structural reason to distrust a Farallon hedge-fund billionaire. They endorsed him anyway. Organizations with dues-paying members whose livelihoods depend on choosing correctly did not make that call out of naivety.
The Field — Every Other Viable Option Is Worse
| Candidate | Wealth Tax | Single-Payer | Corporate $ / Big Oil | Key Labor Endorsers |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Tom Steyer | Will sign + vote yes | CalCare endorsed | None | SEIU CA, CNA, CFT, CTA, AFSCME 3299, IATSE, Our Revolution |
| Xavier Becerra | Opposed | No | Chevron (max legal donation) | CA Medical Association |
| Katie Porter | Opposed SEIU initiative | Nominally yes | Took anti-tax crypto billionaire Chris Larsen money | Emily's List, NUHW |
| Antonio Villaraigosa | Opposed | No | Chevron | Building Trades, PORAC (cops) |
| Matt Mahan | Explicitly against | No | Tech sector billionaires | None from organized labor |
| Tony Thurmond | Full support | Yes | None identified | Polling 1–2%. Not viable. |
Xavier Becerra: Three Words That End the Argument
Xavier Becerra accepted a maximum legal donation from Chevron. [19][20] That is the first corporate donation to a California governor’s race since 2014. Twelve years of norm, broken by the man who served as California’s Attorney General and then as Biden’s Secretary of Health and Human Services. When a journalist pressed him on the Chevron money at a candidate forum, Becerra said: “I need Chevron.” Those three words do all the work.
As California’s AG, Becerra declined to join New York and Massachusetts in their fraud lawsuits against Exxon Mobil. He opposes the SEIU billionaire wealth tax. He says he supports “Medicare for all” but will not commit to single-payer legislation. Becerra is not a reformer who made one unfortunate donor decision. He is a candidate who has made systematic peace with the corporate capture of California Democratic politics and is running on a Biden-era resume as cover. [26]
Antonio Villaraigosa: The Building Trades Candidate
Villaraigosa won the endorsement of the California State Building and Construction Trades Council, took Chevron money, and wants a moratorium on California’s climate regulations. [25] He opposes both the wealth tax and single-payer healthcare. He is the old-coalition deal candidate: construction unions trading environmental protection for project labor agreements, a bargain California workers have been paying for in wildfire smoke and rising heat for twenty years. He is not a villain. He is a specific kind of California Democrat who serves specific interests, and those interests are not the working class.
Matt Mahan: The Silicon Valley Project
San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan is the explicit tech-sector candidate. The donors read like a Silicon Valley Hall of Fame: Sergey Brin, Reid Hoffman, Joe Lonsdale of the Palantir network, Reed Hastings, Michael Moritz, Steve Huffman of Reddit, Garry Tan, Tony Xu of DoorDash, Mark Pincus, Sean Parker. [23][24] His outside money exceeds $25 million. Fortune reported that Silicon Valley donors view him as the only “sane” candidate in the race. [23] When your sanity endorsement comes from people who built fortunes on gig-economy wage theft and regulatory arbitrage, “sane” means “won’t touch our money.” He explicitly opposes the billionaire wealth tax. He wants to suspend the gas tax. He is the tech class’s preferred governor, and the tech class has been running this state through regulatory capture for two decades and would like to do so more directly.
Tony Thurmond: The Best Platform, Permanently
State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond has the cleanest platform in this race by a significant margin: single-payer healthcare, 2 million homes by 2030, abolish ICE, tax billionaires, rent control, a $10 billion housing bond. [27] He is polling at approximately 1 to 2 percent. He cannot win. California’s top-two primary means the November ballot goes to whoever finishes first and second in June, and Thurmond is not in that conversation. His existence is important as a demonstration of what a genuine left platform looks like. His irrelevance is important as a measure of how thoroughly the donor class has monopolized viable California politics. Tony Thurmond exists to show you what the field could look like. He will not be governor.
The Katie Porter Problem
My mom likes Katie Porter. A lot of people like Katie Porter. She’s the whiteboard lady. The consumer protection champion. She made pharmaceutical executives and bank regulators squirm at congressional hearings and she posted the receipts. Her reputation as a working-class fighter is real, earned, and worth examining carefully — because the receipts on her 2026 governor’s race positioning tell a substantially different story than her brand suggests.
Porter opposes the SEIU-UHW billionaire wealth tax initiative. [21] She called it “too narrow.” That is the kind of objection a policy professor makes, and a working-class advocate doesn’t, because a $237 million tax on a single billionaire being “too narrow” is still $237 million that was previously not being taxed. Opposing a wealth tax on scope grounds is functionally the same as opposing it when the alternative is nothing. The working class does not benefit from the perfect blocking the good.
Then there’s Chris Larsen. Larsen is the co-founder of Ripple, the XRP cryptocurrency company, and one of the most aggressive anti-tax billionaires in California politics. Porter accepted his donation. She returned it in March 2026 after backing a San Francisco corporate tax measure that created an obvious conflict with her own donor. [21] That’s the version where she did the right thing eventually. The version where she accepted the check from an anti-tax crypto billionaire in the first place is the same story.
In Fresno, at an agribusiness-oriented campaign event, Katie Porter criticized California's farmworker overtime law. Farmworker overtime protections are among the most meaningful recent labor victories for some of California's most exploited workers.
Criticizing the farmworker overtime law in a room full of agriculture executives is not a policy nuance. It’s a signal. It tells that room, and it tells working people who hear about it, something about whose concerns she weighs when there’s a donor relationship at stake. [21]
Now look at who endorsed her and who didn’t. Emily’s List, which backs female Democratic candidates regardless of economic position, is her anchor endorser. [32] SEIU California endorsed Steyer. The California Nurses Association endorsed Steyer. AFSCME 3299, which represents hospital and University of California workers, endorsed Steyer. The unions that fight daily for wages, benefits, and healthcare access for working Californians looked at the full field and passed on Katie Porter. [33] These are organizations with dues-paying members whose livelihoods depend on choosing correctly. They chose.
Here is the honest version of this: Porter’s consumer protection record in Congress is genuine. She held Wall Street accountable in ways most Democratic members of Congress lack the stomach for. The whiteboard is not a prop. She did the work. But a congressional track record of holding executives accountable does not automatically translate into a governor’s platform that fights for the working class — and on the specific policy questions that will define the next governor’s term, Porter has been more cautious, more donor-palatable, and more ambiguous than her brand implies.
Porter is what happens when a genuinely capable person accepts the structural constraints of California’s Democratic donor class and then wraps the result in a progressive consumer-advocate brand. You can admire her congressional work and still see the governor’s-race pattern clearly. My mom deserves the receipts.
What the Taxes Paid Tell You
Steyer paid $5.4 million in federal taxes in 2024 on $39 million in income. [12][13] Becerra paid $116,000. Porter paid $58,000. These are not income indictments — different income levels produce different tax bills, and nobody is obligated to pay more than they owe. But these numbers are relevant in a race about taxation, about who has skin in the game, and about who is proposing to tax themselves.
Steyer is the only top-tier candidate proposing a measure that would cost him personally $237 million. [4][6] He is self-funding his campaign at $132 million and counting. [22][37] The conflict of interest in his case runs in the direction of his ego, not his donor class. That is not a small distinction in a race where every other major candidate owes something to someone who wrote a check.
The Structural Verdict
Self-funding has its own history of failure. Meg Whitman spent $176 million of her own money on the 2010 California governor’s race and lost to Jerry Brown. Steyer spent $253 million on his own 2020 presidential campaign and won zero delegates. [10] Writing checks does not win elections. It doesn’t guarantee governance quality either. The history of billionaires self-funding their way to power on populist platforms is mostly a history of expensive losses and, on the rare occasion they win, thin governance.
The evidence for Steyer’s conversion is documented. The evidence that the conversion translates into governance is zero, because he hasn’t governed. The labor coalition that endorsed him made a calculated bet. They may be right. They may have been sold on a brand that holds for eighteen months and then quietly surrenders to the same institutional pressures that captured every California Democrat before him. We will not know until, and unless, he wins.
What we do know is this: the 2026 California Democratic primary is a race in which the candidate most aligned with working-class interests on paper is a former Farallon Capital hedge-fund manager who once owned prison stocks and coal mines. Read that sentence again slowly. That is a complete picture of what thirty years of donor-class capture has done to California’s political left. The problem is not Tom Steyer. The problem is a party so thoroughly owned by corporate money that the least-bad option for working people is a billionaire who had to buy his own campaign to escape the donor veto.
The California Democratic Party is the disease. Steyer is a symptom. PG&E, the prison guards’ union, the California Realtors, and the Building Industry are betting $14 million that you won’t notice the difference.
Don’t let them be right.
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