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For those concerned about the influence of Big Tech and billionaires on California’s future, Tom Steyer looks like an obvious choice. A billionaire who amassed his fortune after founding Farallon Capital Management, one of the world’s biggest hedge funds, Steyer quit the firm in 2012 and turned to philanthropy, political advocacy, and climate activism, among other pursuits. Now, he’s jostling for position among a handful of Democratic and GOP candidates looking to advance from a June primary and then win the California governorship this November.
Ahead of the midterms, I’m talking to candidates relevant to WIRED’s interests: A few weeks ago I spoke with Alex Bores, a candidate for New York’s 12th Congressional District, whose history as a Palantir employee and stance on AI regulation has attracted the ire of Silicon Valley–backed super PACs.
Steyer felt like the next obvious choice for a conversation: He’s running to lead a state where issues like AI, immigration enforcement, and climate change, among other core WIRED subjects, are paramount. Steyer’s posture in the race is also unique. He’s been described as a “class traitor” for ostensibly eschewing his fellow elites, voiced support for California’s controversial Billionaire Tax Act—which has everyone from Sergey Brin to Peter Thiel either making moves to or threatening to flee the state—and campaigned hard on affordability, climate policy, and the promise that he’s immune to corporate influence. (As a billionaire spending more than $130 million on his own gubernatorial campaign, I certainly hope he would be.)
As I said, for some Democratic voters, Tom Steyer seems to check a lot of boxes. Then he starts talking.
Steyer is adept, as politicians usually are, at toeing the line. But the line, in politics generally and California specifically, seems to be the problem: Steyer, or whomever is elected to the governorship this November, will be walking an exceedingly thin one. Taxing California’s billionaires without alienating them. Getting a grip on the state’s AI development without throttling it (or, again, alienating the billionaires building it).
I could feel Steyer’s reluctance to come down too firmly or dig in too deeply on issues, maybe to avoid alienating any potential voting block. Which made me wonder: Can Tom Steyer be a pro-billionaire governor who also taxes the hell out of them? Can he rave about the “mind-blowingly amazing” advances in AI while bringing the industry to heel? Can he learn the name of WIRED’s global editorial director (me) before she interviews him?
The third question is answered in the interview. The former two will be formidable challenges for anyone elected to California’s governorship—and I didn’t leave our conversation convinced that Steyer’s posture is a particularly coherent one. The minimum requirement for a California governor might be the ability to use Google.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
KATIE DRUMMOND: Welcome, Tom, thank you for joining us on The Big Interview.
TOM STEYER: Kate [sic], thank you for having me.
So, you’re a billionaire. You made your money in the hedge fund world. But now, in the last decade-plus, you’ve become a climate activist. Tell us about that transformation.
When I was growing up, when I got free time, either from school or work, I tried to go to wild places and get outdoor jobs. I worked as a ranch hand, I worked picking fruit. Before I went to business school, I spent the summer in Alaska, and I went to Alaska because I wanted to see what North America looked like before Europeans showed up.
I wanted to see the animals, I wanted to see the birds, I wanted to see the fish, I wanted to look at Denali. I wanted to see what it looked like, vast untracked North America, rich and fertile.
In 2006, I wanted my wife and four kids, none of whom had ever been there, to see it too. So we went up there for a week. I had a whole bunch of plans of what we could see, but what we could see was Alaska was melting. It was really obvious. It's one thing to read about it on a page when you're working away and thinking about a thousand things, but it's another thing to physically see where there used to be a mountain of ice and now it's a valley.
At what point, though, do you say, “I am going to say goodbye to running a hedge fund. I'm going to turn my back on this career, and I'm going to do something totally different. And a big part of that is going to be climate activism”? How did that happen?
Well, I didn't just leave specifically to do climate. You know, it was funny. I was talking to one of my best friends this morning, and he was saying, “Well, the whole point of life is to have a positive impact.”
I would hope so, yeah.
I got very, very scared that I was going to have a life of no meaning. That's actually what it was. It wasn't that I felt like, “Oh, my God, I'm going to die and I've had no meaning.” It's like I've amassed a whole bunch of, you know, numbers on a spreadsheet, but who cares?
Nobody, including me.
I felt somewhat desperate to get out and push for things that had meaning, including climate. I always thought climate was this huge opportunity for us.
A financial opportunity?
An opportunity for America to be America.
I see, I see.
To lead the world, do the right thing, save the world, build businesses around it. But I wasn't trying to build businesses. I was basically trying to give everybody else a chance to say, "Wow."
It's sort of like the fascists show up and America stands up to them, and it turns out to be great for us. I thought it would be good for us, but I also thought that's how we express ourselves as a nation, by standing up for what's right and succeeding and showing the world how it's done.
So I thought, "Here's a great example. There's something clearly wrong here. We can do the tech. We can do the finance. We can do the global leadership. Let's do it, man. Let’s be Americans."
I want to move on to talking about your run for governor of California, but climate is a big piece of that. Obviously, Trump is in office. What kind of power does the governor's seat give you vis-à-vis climate policy, knowing that Donald Trump is the president of the United States?
I think it gives us a chance to show what success looks like. I think what Donald Trump is doing, he's showing the world what failure looks like. He's so scared of failure, and he's failing on an absolutely gargantuan scale. But success looks like moving rapidly to sustainable clean energy that's cheaper, proving to the world that doing this is actually the way to succeed economically as well as doing the right thing. We build a bunch of companies around it. We get some great technologies going, all of which are happening, all of which are within our grasp. It's kind of like the president is desperately fighting to keep us on whale oil. I mean, it's nuts.
Your commitment to being a “good billionaire” is laudable, I think. But your critics have questioned some of Farallon Capital Management, your former hedge fund's, past investments. The New York Times published a piece earlier this month questioning whether you still have financial ties to investments that include fossil fuels. I want to hear from you more fully on this, and I know that our listeners do too. What can you tell voters about the status of your investments vis-à-vis that hedge fund?
The thing that I have left at Farallon is some residual buildings, investing in real estate. I divested from all the oil and gas from there in 2012. That's one of the reasons I left. I didn't feel that I could change that organization. People had signed up, hundreds of people had signed up to run an organization a certain way, and I had moved on.
And, you know, I was the head of it, so you'd think I could just be like, "This is what we're doing." But that's not really how organizations work in my mind, and I'm not that person anyway. So I was like, "No, anything that's left there, you have to get me out of anything related to fossil fuels and a number of other things. I just can't have it." And that happened 14 years ago.
The reason I left was I didn't feel that I could be there and do what I'm doing now without people thinking I was a hypocrite.
What do you think about the fact that you built your wealth in that world? How do you grapple with that? How would you urge voters to think about it?
I think about it pretty simply, which is this: I worked in finance. I went to Stanford Business School. All of those worlds are premised on the idea, which I accepted, that basically the way that progress happens is through a combination of capitalism and democracy.
Mm-hmm.
Therefore capitalism is an engine. You know, Warren Buffett will say this better than I have. He said, basically, capitalism has produced all the material advantage that people have got from all over the world. It is the driving force for a more productive economy and one which produces goods and services at a level that is never before seen in the history of the world, and it is a huge force for good.
And I accepted that. It was kind of like that was the mantra. What happened was, as I was there and started to examine it and think more independently, I thought, "OK, that's true in a lot of ways." It is true in a lot of ways, I haven't rejected it, but it's also the case that it's not always true.
When it isn't true, it can be spectacularly not true. So I felt like, OK, it's no longer a blanket cover for everything. In fact, I felt like I had to lead my life differently, and I had to invest differently, and I had to change because I came to a realization that the basic premise that it's all good is not true.
Therefore, I didn't want to live that way, and I wanted to change the way I invested. I did want to completely change what I was doing, so it wasn't just about investing. I very much wanted to do that, but I also felt like the investing itself, I wasn't as OK with, for the reason you just said. Like, doesn't that seem hypocritical, Tom? It's like, yeah, it does.
It absolutely does.
I was like, “OK, it's gotta stop.” It took me a long time to get out of there. Every single person in that firm was the primary breadwinner for their family. Every single person. And we had the trust of hundreds of pension funds, endowments, and foundations, and I just didn't feel like we could leave them in the lurch. I felt like it's really important to get this transition to happen right, and it took a long time.
But the idea that I haven't made that transition is a decade and a half out of date.
You know, a lot of progressives, and I think some of the voters you're trying to court, don't think that billionaires should exist in the first place. That becoming a billionaire in and of itself is immoral, that there is not an ethical route to being a billionaire and sustaining that level of wealth. What do you say to that?
Look, California is about innovation and ideas. It's about imagining and creating the future. That's what we do. That's what this state is about. Frankly, that's what WIRED magazine is covering.
It is.
People who come up with an idea that's never been thought of before and changed the world.
That's much more possible now for a whole bunch of reasons involving software, information technology, the ability to expand infinitely. So if you say to me, "If someone comes up with an idea that can be turned into a business that can change the world, that can actually do immense good, should we just put a lid on that? Should we not give the incentive there?"
I have a different attitude. My attitude is this: There's a reason people come to California to build a business, because we have the ecosystem to build a business. Most of what that entails is a bunch of people fighting to build a system over a thousand years that involves rule of law, democracy, freedom.
Now, if you look at California, this state runs because of very hardworking, very skilled people who are paid not very much at all.
Mm-hmm.
So when someone says to me, “I'm going to come to California, I'm going to build a business,” great. “It's going to change the world,” great. “And then I'm going to try and rip those people off, not be a good citizen, not pay my fair share, do everything I can to basically extract from that system what it has without being a part of that system,” that offends me.
The extraction you're referring to, is that how you see the current ecosystem in California now? Do you think there is exploitation happening?
No. I think that to a large extent, people come here, they build these great businesses, and mostly they stay, they pay their taxes, they're good citizens, they do a whole bunch of things. There are a bunch of people who don't do that. They come and they're worried that, in fact, they never have to share anything that they made. “It's all mine.”
It is not all yours, by the way. You came here because there was a system that let you succeed. You could have gone to 190 other countries. You could have gone to 49 other states, but you came here for a good reason, ’cause this is the best place to start and build a business. So you should be part of that ecosystem, and you should take pride.
You might call it shared prosperity. You should take pride in the prosperity that you're creating, and you should take pride in sharing it, because this whole system doesn't work with the kind of inequality that we're seeing. I mean, I know you know this, but the inequality is more than the Gilded Age.
Being in San Francisco, for me, for the last 10 years has been a very strange experience. I mean, it is visceral. You can see it when you walk down the street.
One of the issues that you’re being asked to chime in on and that potentially, as governor, you would inherit is the California Billionaire Tax Act. Which is what you were just talking about in terms of shared prosperity. You've said you're in favor of it. You've also said it doesn't go far enough. Tell me more about that, because this is not the most popular idea among some of the prominent billionaires who currently call California home.
Look, I said if it’s on the ballot I will vote for it, and I said it doesn't go far enough. It's a one-time tax. It takes the money, and it puts it into a very specific use that doesn't specifically include education, and one of the things that I'm saying is we need to be much better at education in the state of California.
We really need to refocus on it, because we used to be the best education state. To a very large extent, there are issues with the way that bill is written and designed that I think are very imperfect, but the basic point is this: We have the highest percentage of people in poverty in the United States of America. We have the greatest inequality. We have an incredibly high average income, but that average includes some off-the-charts incomes. The majority of Californians are really struggling to make ends meet.
I mean, millions of people are giving up their health care insurance so they can make rent. People who have worked, been fully employed for 20 years, living in their cars. I mean, that doesn't make any sense. What I'm talking about is, how do we redress this? You know, part of that is we need to have a sense from everybody of shared prosperity.
Am I against billionaires? No. I want people to come here and change the world, and there's some stuff going on that is absolutely mind-blowingly great, honestly. I want us to be the generator of ideas and innovation that changes the future for everyone in the state, builds great companies, and changes the world.
I just want it to be done in the context of a system that doesn't forget our teachers, doesn't forget the nurses, doesn't forget the people who are working in the schools, doesn't forget the custodians. You know, there's a sense that somehow these people are ripping off the system. That is the absolute opposite of the truth.
These are the people who make the system run, and they are really at their wits' end, and that's why I'm running. If you think that this extraordinarily unequal system, which is getting more unequal all the time, should go on exactly as it is, there are a lot of people to vote for, and there are people out there who are saying, "I'm for oil companies. I believe in the electric monopolies." But if you believe it's impossible for most people to afford California and that we need to stand up for working people, then honestly I'm the only game in town. I find that ironic, but it happens to be true.
I mean, look, it's a tough equation for anyone to solve in the sense that, yes, it is very important that San Francisco and California remain engines of innovation, right? That the people leading these companies stay, that the companies themselves stay.
We've seen some technology companies that have relocated out of California. I can't imagine that’s something you would want to see continue. So many of the people who are opposed to this act say that California will lose its edge when it comes to innovation and invention because people will go elsewhere.
How do you preserve that, while also creating a more egalitarian order in California? I don't envy anyone trying to solve that dilemma, but do you worry about losing the companies?
I want to make sure that we remain the center of innovation. I want to make sure that we remain the place where the companies that are changing the world are begun and grow and stay. Absolutely. In my mind, the reason that California is what it is—and you work at WIRED magazine, Kate [sic], so I'm sure …
I run WIRED magazine, Tom.
You do?
I sure do.
I didn't know that. Do you know Katrina Heron?
The only other woman who's ever run it?
Old friend of mine.
Oh, wow.
You didn't know that.
No, I didn't know she was your friend, but I know that she is the only other woman other than me who's ever run it in 33 years.
She's an old friend. Um, but that's beside the point.
I remember back in the tech wreck of 2000, 2002, I was talking to an old friend of mine who's a venture capitalist. I was like, “Roger, you know, this looks bad.” And he goes, “What do you mean?” I go, “This looks bad. I mean, all these stocks are down 90 percent. These companies are going out of business.” And he goes, “Doesn't look bad.” I said, “You don't think so?” He goes, “No. There are incredible companies being built right now, and those companies are going to change the world.”
And of course, he was right. He said, “And they're all in the Bay Area. So let's be clear. The stocks come and go, but the technology, the innovation, the real creativity happens here.” And I said, “Well, why is that?” He said, “Take a look. It's not happening anywhere else.” I said, “Tell me why.” And he said, “You wanna start a tech company in the Bay Area, you have your choice of CFOs, you have your choice of CTOs, you have your choice of all the different things. Anyplace else, you don't. So this is the place where there's actually the human capital.” That's the key part of this. You can’t build these companies, because companies are built around people.
As long as we have the ecosystem of people, that's really the secret sauce, and that's why I'm such a maniac about making sure we have this great higher education system. That's why I'm a big believer. I think immigrants have built California. I love immigration to California. I want people to come here who want to work their tails off and really change the world.
On the subject of immigrants, you have publicly called for major ICE reforms. California, of course, is a sanctuary state, so that puts you, potentially, right at the center of a fight with the federal government, coming back again to President Trump. How do you make sure California maintains its sanctuary status if you're elected governor?
I think we enforce our state laws. We have to prosecute people who racially profile in the state of California. It is illegal. We have to prosecute people who use violence against the people of California, including the people who send them to do violence. We have to inspect the detention centers because clearly they're closed for a reason.
People need to be represented. The job of the governor of California at some level is standing between violence and danger and unfairness and the people of California.
You know, if you look at the electric monopolies that charge us twice as much as the rest of the United States pays for electricity. Someone has to stand up for the Californians in that fight, someone who's in a position of power.
And certainly with ICE, I do think it's a criminal organization. I think it was designed to be criminal. There is no other reason for them to be wearing face masks. There is no other reason for them to be carrying ARs. And they feel they can do it with impunity. It's very clear that the agents in Minnesota don't think they're ever going to go to jail for shooting Americans.
How much can you prosecute ICE agents, for example, while Trump is still in office and the agency is still intact?
I believe that the next president, whoever he or she may be, will be centered enough to recognize that you're not supposed to have a violent, masked, assault-rifle-armed secret police going around the United States with impunity.
You would think so.
That seems to me to be an absolutely clear point, that only despotic regimes do that stuff.
And the idea that we should somehow negotiate with that or cooperate with that, I pushed really hard for us to be a sanctuary state. That no police officer is supposed to cooperate with ICE except with regard to violent criminals. What they are doing is clearly wrong.
We've moved to a place in our political discourse where the willingness to stand up and say, “No, this is just completely wrong” is much reduced. There are so many things that are wrong that people just now accept. I don't want to do that. That is not what California stands for.
I want to make sure we talk about AI, which is obviously a huge topic for us here at WIRED, and I think certainly for the current governor of California and whoever comes next will be a major issue to get right. I'm curious about how you see the governor's role in creating safeguards around AI to protect creators, for one, but to also protect jobs in the state.
Well, let me say this: AI obviously has some stuff going on with it, which I'm sure you're familiar with, which is incredibly, mind-blowingly great.
Highly consequential, yeah.
I think the outcome will either be incredibly important or staggeringly important. That's the range. And it's kinda like nobody really knows which of those two things it will be, but it will be one of those two things. But I think it's really important to have safeguards around this, in multiple ways. The obvious one is for kids. We need safeguards that are for kids, because its ability to seduce kids into things that are not good for them … I try not to even think about it because it can go to some places that are pretty amazing, and not in a good way.
Testing the models before they're released. I think we went through this whole thing with this model from Anthropic, where it's like they said, “We're going to do a very limited release ’cause this is too powerful. If we give this right out right now, then people with malign intent can use it to do things.” And we know that, so it's important to make sure that it's controlled in that way, but also not to release models that have not been tested, we can't be sure work, blah, blah. So that's two. And then I think the most important part about this is we don't know what the impact of this will be on employment.
Right.
So I've said, “Look, I want AI to be a tool for workers, not a replacement for workers.” But I'm aware, and I think anyone who reads the papers knows, I say to everybody, “It's not like AI is coming. AI's here.”
Mm-hmm.
It's sort of like saying, you know, “Let's wait till the 21st century and see what happens.” We're in 2026, dude. We're in the 21st century. And what I've said is, we need to make sure that we are protecting workers, and our campaign has made a guarantee that every worker displaced by AI, we will succeed in getting a well-paid job with benefits. People need to know that, because let me give you the alternative: all the people who are not saying that and who have vague policies of, “We'll see what happens,” which is honestly what the other people are doing.
The other people, meaning your opponents?
Right. If you look at Xavier Becerra's policy, it's like we know there'll be job displacement, but we'll see what happens and respond to it, which is a big nothingburger in my mind. In the 1970s and ’80s the traditional Midwestern businesses, including cars, suddenly got foreign competition and suddenly had technological changes, and it hollowed out those cities, and they've never come back.
I think there were promises from politicians about what they'd do about it, but it didn't happen. So I believe we need to be ahead of that, prepared with the ability to get people into new jobs with training, specific jobs. There are a lot of jobs in California, and we need to get people into those jobs and do it in a way so that when you sign up, you have a training program, and at the end of it is actually a job with an actual wage in an actual place.
That is something I think is going to be a critical part for the next governor. How big a part depends on whether it's amazingly big or astonishingly big.
And if you're curious for more about that, WIRED actually covered the proposal. I'm curious about California in the context of the national conversation around AI. To what extent is the way California handles AI, and the way an incoming governor decides to regulate the industry and the technology, a road map for the rest of the country?
I want California to be a road map for the rest of the country because I disagree so strongly with what's going on in Washington, DC. I want us to succeed substantively in everything, in all the things I'm talking about in terms of better education, cheaper houses, cheaper electricity, making polluters pay, so that actually this becomes a great place to live for everybody and everybody can afford it.
I care about California. I want us to succeed, but I also want to show the world we don't have to be despotic people who take pride in their cruelty in the United States of America. That's not what our country stands for. We can succeed at a level in terms of creating a better society that people apparently don't think is possible, and it is absolutely possible, and that's exactly why I'm running for governor, to say, “We can create this society right now.”
Tom, I want to end with a little game, if you're up for it. The game is called Control, Alt, Delete, and we play it with every guest. I want to know what piece of technology would you love to control? What piece would you love to alt, so alter or change? And what would you love to delete? What would you love to vanquish from the Earth if given the opportunity?
So two of them are easy. I wanna think about one of them. So delete. I want to end the ability to transport liquified natural gas.
That is very specific. Please explain that one a little bit more.
Well, you know, natural gas is a gas. So traditionally, it has been a local thing. In the United States, the cost of natural gas is somewhere around $3.85 for a thousand cubic feet, just to put it in context.
In Europe, it's probably $17. Same thing. It's a local market. They don't have it, we have a lot of it, and there's a move to basically build huge terminals, build special ships to turn natural gas into a liquid, and put it onto a ship. It's a whole complicated technology, and people are spending tens of billions of dollars on it. LNG is dirtier than coal.
Where do you want that money going instead?
I want it to go into the stuff that is cheaper, faster, and better. I want it to go into clean electricity, battery development. I want it to go into pushing us toward all the uses of electricity that we can use it for. If you take a look at where we are in the natural world, it’s critical that we get rid of the idea that fossil fuels are cheap. Fossil fuels aren't cheap. Fossil fuels, without any cost for old-fashioned particulate pollution or climate change, are much more expensive than clean energy.
The one I'd alt—I think we need to have a relationship with AI where we make sure that as it explodes that it's done in a way so that we don't get the second-order effects that can be really dramatically terrible. Everyone's like, “Oh, no, no, you're going to stifle it.”
The innovation question, the race against China question, how do you respond to that when you talk about guardrails and regulation?
We're not going to stifle it. I'm a very practical person. Let's take a look at what happened with social media. We didn't do anything, and take a look at where we are and take a look at where the kids are. I'm old enough to remember when the Democrats told Wall Street they could police themselves. It was sort of like, “Really? That's your idea?”
So the idea that things that have immense impact can be controlled by the people whose total focus is their bottom line seems to me to be like, “OK, so you're saying the government doesn't exist.”
Obviously we need to watch out for negative outcomes and avoid them for the people of California and the United States. It doesn't mean stifling innovation. It means having rules to protect people from really dangerous things.
All right. So I believe you said you would delete liquid …
LNG.
LNG. You would alt the AI regulatory environment. What are we controlling? Other than the state of California, I guess.
No one, it'll never be one person controlling it. I think the one that we should control is—and there's such a fine line between control and alt—but I think that, in finance, we should control the way crypto is used.
Oh, interesting. Tell me more.
I just think that this is a technology, which I'm fine with, but I just think it's one of those things where we need to make sure that there are things to protect people who are investing in these tokens.
I think the industry agrees with that. They've spent a long time saying, “Stop trying to outlaw us. Give us regulations so that we can build our businesses.” Which I'm totally fine with, and that's what I would describe as control. I think control's the wrong word because you never control something. You basically have regulations that make sense and protect unsophisticated people from damage.
But you could. You could be controlling all the meme coins in the world if you wanted to, in this thought exercise.
Well, you know, you should understand that I'm going to control them and just take a very small fee every time they trade. Oh, there's someone already doing that. I didn't realize that … That was a joke.
We will make sure it registers as a joke. Thank you so much for your time.
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