As soon as enough votes were counted to officially remove Tom Steyer from the race for governor of California, anti-billionaire schadenfreude set in.
Social media and legacy media, conservative and liberal, all seemed to have an unusual confluence of ideas, bringing endless variations of, “How are you trying to buy elected office! We showed you.”
“I hope you got the message from California that a power-hungry communist billionaire can’t buy a state!” wrote one dissenter on social media. “How much money have you spent spamming Californians? Do you know how many hundreds of millions of dollars you’ve spent?”
“Stop the waste,” screamed a New York Times headline, criticizing Steyer for not donating that money directly to building housing or funding Planned Parenthood — actions that prop up broken systems instead of changing them.
I get it.
In an age where income inequality has reached serf-lord levels, hating the rich seems easy and logical. You can take a few zeros out of the $200 million Steyer spent on his campaign and you’ll still have more than most of us make in a lifetime. That’s an infuriating reality for many, if not most of us, for whom pairing a full tank of gas with a restaurant dinner seems like a reckless luxury these days.
I am not here to defend the class of nine zeros. But maybe we should pick up the pace and make sure our anger is working for us, not against us. While Steyer has spent the past few months fighting for universal health care, better wages and worker protections, and imposing restrictions on unregulated companies from the energy sector to AI, other billionaires have spent that time undermining democracy and our financial system. Heck, some even seem to look down on humanity. Why are we not angry with them?
Take, for example, one billionaire who seems to want to be a billionaire: Elon Musk.
Last week, his SpaceX held an IPO where somehow Wall Street rules meant to protect small investors and pension plans were set aside for his benefit. Like it or not, if you hold a public pension or 401(k) in America using index funds (which most do) you will likely be an investor in an uninsured and risky venture. I’m sure that will work fine.
Or consider the hundreds of millions of dollars right-wing AI and watchdog billionaires, some Californians, are throwing into political races across the country right now to make sure their dangerous and unpredictable technology isn’t regulated, or regulated in trivial ways. The situation is so dire that one wealthy insider recently warned in an op-ed of his own that if his former colleagues succeed, “It could concentrate economic power in ways that will make the Reunion Era look strange.”
Then there is our president, the king of self-enrichment, whose wealth has soared to more than $6 million during his time in office. Much of that moola is in opaque cryptocurrency holdings, an industry he has conquered as his wealth in it has grown.
But don’t think Trump is doing it all for himself: He’s enriching his family, too.
His daughter Ivanka recently made her own “cake-eating” headlines with an alleged $1.5-billion project to turn an uninhabited Albanian island into a luxury resort. Albanians are very mad, they have been protesting in the streets for almost two weeks. Meanwhile, his brothers abandoned their father’s crypto-ventures to make their own fortunes, as other investors lost.
Those are our individual billionaires, they don’t care about corporations, who can throw away a lot of money at their political will because of the 2010 Citizens Alliance Supreme Court ruling. By 2025, the oil and gas industry in California, led by Chevron and the Western States Petroleum Assn., spent nearly $34 million on lobbying. Not to be outdone, the Golden State’s water and power interests, including PG&E, have spent nearly $35 million to politicize their cause.
But sure, hate the bad boy in vintage Nikes who points this all out.
“I’m proud of the enemies we’ve made,” Steyer said in his statement. “In this race, those companies have shown that they see a government that puts working people first as an existential threat – even if it’s proposed by a billionaire. By spending $55 million – the most for a single person in a California elementary school – they’ve shown the lengths they’ll go to protect the status quo that only serves them and their profits.”
I also don’t like the amount of money in our political system, but the truth is, it is there. Worse still, most of the haves seem intent on reducing the political and economic power of the have-nots.
We are moving towards a world where the welfare of the many will depend on the abundance of the few – the Silicon Valley tech industry is now talking about universal basic income as the biggest benefit of the future mass unemployment it creates.
But is living without financial gain what we want for ourselves and our children? Do we really want these rich people to use their money unchecked to make decisions that will shape our future, reduce our rights and ultimately leave us powerless to fight back?
If Steyer wants to use his money to join this fight to keep power for the people and for the people, the enemy of my enemy is my friend.
Like it or not, we ordinary bees need money to fight money. In an age where animus eats common sense like the rich eat caviar, it’s a luxury we can’t afford to hate good people just because it’s easy – even if they’re billionaires.
