Tom Steyer
Tom Steyer has worked across several fields — as a businessman, entrepreneur, founder, investment banker, philanthropist, and politician — a range of roles that resists easy summary but points to a life conducted at some remove from narrow specialization.
Born in New York City on June 27, 1957, Steyer began his formal education at the Buckley School before progressing to Phillips Exeter Academy. He then attended Yale College, where he was a member of Ezra Stiles College, and subsequently completed graduate study at Stanford Graduate School of Business. That sequence of institutions — from a New York prep school through an Ivy League college and on to Stanford — charts the educational formation of someone who would go on to work as an investment banker and then as an entrepreneur and founder in business.
His career has encompassed both commerce and civic life, with his roles as businessperson and politician running alongside his sustained work as a philanthropist. The combination of business activity, founding work, and philanthropy has shaped his public identity across the decades since his graduate education at Stanford. That he has moved between the private and public sectors — operating as an entrepreneur and investment banker while also engaging in politics and organized giving — reflects the breadth suggested by his occupational record, even if the precise contours of each chapter remain, in this account, confined to what the record directly supports.
Quotes by Tom Steyer
If you're struggling to make your mortgage payment, and you've got three kids between the ages of 12 and 18, and you and your spouse works, and someone says, 'Oh, by the way, the world's ending,' it's like, 'Please. You don't need to tell me that.'
Americans can take on huge projects. But they need to understand why they should take on a huge project.
We think that when the American people make a decision together that they want something, politicians have to listen to them, and that's the process we believe in.
Another word for politics in my mind is organization. You have to be organized; you have to get out there. It's not just magic.
I'm a 30-year businessperson. I believe in American business. I believe in American ingenuity, and I believe in American innovation.
I think that my general feeling about the United States is that democracy works, and I've believed that my whole life, and my experience as a businessperson for 30 years was if you ignore the sound and fury, American democracy works if you give it enough time.
I think the days of the climate deniers are over. To deny basic science is to risk the trust of the general public.
The most powerful thing in politics is voter-to-voter contact. People take in ideas and formulate opinions by contact with other people they perceive to be trustworthy - other voters, people from their communities.
We agree that Citizens United is a very bad decision. We don't believe outspending your opponent is the way to go, since we don't believe we will ever be outspending our opponents!
We believe the way social change occurs in the United States, over the last 200 years, is the democratic process.