Tom Steyer

Tom Steyer has been married to his wife, Kathryn “Kat” Ann Taylor, since August 1986. A Harvard graduate, Taylor received her J.D./M.B.A from Stanford. The wedding was officiated by Rev. Richard Thayer, a Presbyterian minister, and Rabbi Charles Famila. They have four children together, three sons, Samuel Taylor ("Sam"), Charles Augustus ("Gus"), and Henry Hume ("Henry"), and a daughter, Evelyn Hoover ("Evi”).

Like her husband, Taylor is highly active as a philanthropist and liberal activist. She was a member of the President’s Council for the United Religions Initiative that seeks to “promote enduring, daily interfaith cooperation, to end religiously motivated violence, and to create cultures of peace, justice and healing for the Earth and all living beings."

Steyer is deeply religious and is a member of the Episcopal Church, adopting his mother’s religion. His father was a non-practising Jew. He has stated that his concern for the environment grew alongside his Christian faith.

Born on June 27, 1957, in Manhattan, New York, Tom Steyer is one of the three sons of Marnie (née Fahr) and Roy Henry Steyer. His father was a lawyer, who became a partner at the New York-based law firm Sullivan & Cromwell, while he mother was an educator who, at one point, taught remedial reading at the Brooklyn House of Detention.

Steyer’s two brothers are James “Jim” Pearson Steyer, a civil rights activist, child advocate, educator, and author, and Hume Steyer, a partner at Seward & Kissel LLP.

Hailing from an affluent family, he received unarguably the best education that money could buy. He began his student life at Buckley School in New York City and went on to enrol at Phillips Exeter Academy, a co-educational boarding school located in Exeter, New Hampshire.

Following his graduation, Steyer began attending Yale University in 1975, pursuing degrees in economics and political science. He then enrolled at Stanford Business School from where he received his Master of Business Administration (MBA).

After graduating from Yale summa cum laude, Tom Steyer began working at Morgan Stanley in 1979. This was his first job in the banking sector. He worked there until 1981 and then began attending Stanford for his MBA degree.

When he graduated, he found employment as an associate in the risk arbitrage division of Goldman Sachs. He was there from 1983 to 1985, primarily involved in mergers and acquisitions.

Steyer left Goldman Sachs after he got the offer to be a member of the Executive Committee at the San Francisco based private equity firm, Hellman & Friedman.

He left Hellman & Friedman in 1986, and after taking $15 million in seed capital, he founded Farallon Capital Management and set up its headquarters in San Francisco. Within 25 years of its inception, the high-performance hedge fund has become one of the largest in the industry. In 2011, its market value was measured at $21 billion.

At present, the firm has a second office in the US. In order to serve their east coast clients, the firm set up an office in New York. They expanded its operation beyond the US border as well. It has offices in Singapore, Hong Kong, Tokyo, and London.

Tom Steyer and his wife set up OneRoof in 2006. It is a business initiative that seeks to introduce technology to rural India. They also set up the TomKat Ranch in Pescadero, California, near Half Moon Bay, which serves as a place for research and demonstration of sustainable ways of farming. Around 2011, he became a member of the board of Next Generation, a non-profit initiative focused on solving various children’s and environmental issues and went on to establish NextGen America.

Steyer started his initiative for policies that would encourage income equality, Fair Shake Commission on Income Inequality and Middle Class Opportunity, in August 2015.