California’s race for governor took a bizarro turn Friday when progressive supporters of Tom Steyer, the race’s lone billionaire, ripped San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan for being supported by too many billionaires, even as one Steyer supporter said he didn’t think «we should have billionaires.»
Friday’s press event featuring two San Jose state legislators was an elevation of Steyer’s burgeoning it-takes-a billionaire-to-fight-one strategy that is at the core of his campaign.
A conga line of wealthy tech titans is supporting Mahan, campaign finance documents show, including Google co-founder Sergey Brin, the third-richest person in the world. Others tech industry donors to Mahan include Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan; Sean Parker collaborator Joe Green, who co-founded the political- and community-building sites NationBuilder and Causes (which Mahan later led) and the pro-immigration Fwd.us with Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg; Cruise Automation co-founder Kyle Vogt; venture capitalist Brian Singerman; Los Angeles developer Rick Caruso, who was also mulling a run for governor; GitHub co-founder Chris Wainsrath; former Y Combinator partner Michael Seibel; and venture capitalist Joe Lonsdale.
«What scares me the most is who is getting behind the Mahan campaign,» Assembly Member Ash Kalra, D-San Jose, said Friday. Kalra worried that «these millionaire tech elitists don’t just want someone in the governor’s mansion who is friendly to them, they want someone who’s going to be obedient to them.»
Kalra, a former leader of the Legislative Progressive Caucus, said that «I don’t really think that we should have billionaires.»
Assembly Member Alex Lee, D-San Jose, current chair of the Legislative Progressive Caucus, asserted that Steyer is a different kind of billionaire. Steyer has joined striking teachers in San Francisco and health care workers in San Diego on the picket lines. He supports single-payer health care, closing tax loopholes for the wealthy and eliminating corporate PACs. He has taken the Giving Pledge, promising to give away most of his money.
Steyer «is the billionaire who will take on the evil billionaires. He has the independence to be out there championing progressive causes,» Lee said. He pointed out that no San Jose-based state legislators are supporting Mahan.
Lee and Kalra were co-authors of legislation introduced this week to create a single-payer health care system in California. Steyer also supports single payer health care with the caveat that California will not move to a single-payer system overnight. «A state can’t just say we’re single-payer,» he told the Chronicle Monday. «It takes several years and the cooperation of the national government. It’s a process. We’ll start the process on Day 1, but it’s a process that takes a lot of work and a number of steps.»
Mahan, for his part, ripped Steyer for his wealth at the first debate earlier this month in San Francisco. After Steyer boasted that he supported higher taxes on the wealthy and that he was the candidate to «take on the billionaires for working families» Mahan replied with a dig at Steyer’s estimated net worth: «Tom, I’ve got about 3 billion reasons not to trust your answer on that.»
Lee said that people should «rightly be skeptical of any billionaire. I think to become a billionaire, there are a lot of uncomfortable things in the business world that (have to) happen.»
The Farrallon Capital portfolio that made Steyer wealthy included investments in the coal, oil and gas sectors. Asked about that in 2019, Steyer told the Verge: «Look, when I was running our investment firm, we invested in every part of the economy. Over a decade ago, I realized that the energy that was fueling the economy in America and around the world had this huge unintended consequence of climate change. So I did divest.»