Tom Steyer hopes you forgot.
He wants to be California’s next governor, and he’s counting on voters to overlook how he made the fortune he now uses to lecture them.
Of course he’s running. In California political circles, everyone assumed he’d jump in sooner or later.
But the real story isn’t his entry into the race — it’s the decades he spent helping create the affordability crisis he now promises to fix.
You wouldn’t know that from the glowing headline in my hometown paper: “Billionaire environmentalist Tom Steyer announces run for California governor.”
Not one mention of how he actually made his money.
Let’s be honest: Steyer didn’t make his massive fortune fighting fossil fuels.
He made it expanding fossil fuels.
As the founder and longtime head of Farallon Capital, Steyer oversaw billions in coal, oil, gas, pipeline, and private-prison investments.
These weren’t passive buys buried in an index fund. They were targeted, high-return deals he reviewed, approved, and profited from.
Farallon helped fund more than $2 billion in coal acquisitions in Indonesia and Australia, enabling enormous production increases.
The fund also invested heavily in Nexen (oil sands), McMoRan (offshore drilling), and Kinder Morgan (pipelines) — while Steyer later campaigned loudly against Keystone XL.
And he pocketed money from Corrections Corporation of America before reinventing himself as a criminal-justice reformer.
That’s not conscience. That’s convenience.
Only after stepping away from Farallon — and after years of cashing the checks — did Steyer rebrand himself as an environmental savior.
But while he polished his image, he was pushing policies that raised costs for millions of Californians.
In 2010, he helped defeat Proposition 23, locking in the state’s cap-and-tax climate regime under AB 32.
At the time, California electricity rates were roughly 25% above the national average. Today, they’re about 80% higher.
You don’t need a PhD to connect those dots.
Gas once cost about 30 cents more per gallon here. Now the gap is around $1.40.
And the anti-oil agenda Steyer championed helped drive two additional refineries out of the state this year — a blow to supply that almost guarantees higher prices.
Manufacturing? California has shed roughly 30,000 jobs since Steyer’s climate vision took hold, while the rest of America added more than a million.
Housing costs soared as environmental mandates throttled suburban development.
And Steyer’s 2012 corporate-tax initiative made it tougher for companies to escape California’s high-tax environment, which only accelerated their decision to move operations elsewhere.
Now he says he wants to fix affordability.
Steyer’s campaign video complains about high utility bills, expensive housing and underperforming schools — all problems driven in part by the policies he pushed.
Then he trots out the familiar formula: raise taxes on businesses, expand state control and insist that this time government will magically get it right.
And last week, while promoting 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 words from a man worth roughly $1.6 billion — wealth built, again, in coal, oil, drilling, pipelines and private prisons.
Boiled down, his message is: I helped break California. Elect me to fix it.
The 2026 Democratic field is already thin: a former Cabinet official, a current and ex-members of Congress, and statewide politicians whose careers run through the same public-employee-union pipeline.
Gavin Newsom is too busy polishing his 2028 storyline to pay much attention to the state he currently governs.
And now Steyer — who burned nearly $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 resources.
He has consultants eager to burn through them.
What he doesn’t have is a credible answer to the central question: Why should Californians trust a man who made his fortune in the fossil fuel industry, as he channels his inner Greta Thunberg?
Steyer isn’t the reformer he claims to be.
His biggest problem isn’t his message — it’s the mirror.
Jon Fleischman, a longtime strategist in California politics, writes at SoDoesItMatter.com.
This story originally appeared on NYPost
