The enemy of my enemy is a billionaire. Get over it

As soon as enough votes were counted to officially knock Tom Steyer out of the California governor's race, the anti-billionaire schadenfreude kicked in. Social media and legacy media, conservative and liberal, all seemed to have a rare melding of the minds, delivering endless variations of, "How dare he try to buy elected office! We showed him."

"I hope you received the message from California that a power-hungry communist billionaire cannot buy the state!" wrote one detractor on social media. "How much money did you waste spamming Californians? Do you know how many hundreds of millions of dollars you wasted?" "What a waste," screamed a New York Times headline, slamming Steyer for not donating that money directly to building houses or funding Planned Parenthood — one-off actions that prop up broken systems instead of changing them.

I get it. In an age when income inequality is reaching serf-lord levels, hating the rich seems easy and reasonable. You could take several zeros off the $200 million Steyer spent on his campaign and it would still be more than most of us make in a lifetime. That's a rage-inducing reality for many, if not most of us, for whom pairing a full tank of gas with a restaurant dinner seems like careless luxury these days.

I'm not here to defend the nine-zeroes class. But maybe we should take a beat and make sure our outrage is working for us, not against us. While Steyer has spent the last few months advocating for universal healthcare, better pay and protections for workers, and putting curbs on out-of-control corporations from the energy sector to AI, other billionaires have spent that time actively undermining democracy and our financial system. Heck, some even seem to be undermining humanity. Why aren't we raging at them?

Take, for example, a certain billionaire who seemingly would prefer to be a trillionaire: Elon Musk. Last week, his SpaceX held an IPO in which somehow the rules of Wall Street meant to protect small investors and pension plans were set aside to his benefit. Like it or not, if you hold a public pension or a 401(k) in America that uses index funds (which most do) you will likely be an investor in his unproven and possibly risky business. I'm sure that will work out fine.

Or consider the hundreds of millions of dollars right-wing AI and surveillance-company billionaires, some Californians, are dumping into political races across the country right now to ensure that their dangerous and unpredictable technologies are not regulated, or regulated in largely meaningless ways. It's a situation so dire that one wealthy insider last week warned in his own op-ed that if his former colleagues are successful, "It could concentrate economic power in ways that would make the Gilded Age look quaint."

Then there's our president, king of self-enrichment, whose wealth has skyrocketed to more than $6 billion during his time in office. Much of that moola is in opaque cryptocurrency holdings, an industry he has championed as his fortunes in it have increased. But don't think Trump is in it only for himself: He's enriching his family, too.

His daughter Ivanka Trump recently made her own "eat cake" headlines over an alleged $1.5-billion project that would convert an uninhabited Albanian island into a luxury resort. The Albanians are so mad, they've been protesting in the streets for nearly two weeks. Meanwhile, her brothers have coat-tailed off their dad's crypto-ventures to make their own fortunes, as other investors suffered losses. Those are our individual billionaires, never mind the corporations, who can dump as much money as they want into our politics thanks to the Supreme Court's 2010 Citizen's United decision. In 2025, the oil and gas industry in California, led by Chevron and the Western States Petroleum Assn., spent about $34 million on lobbying. Not to be outdone, the Golden State's water and electricity interests, including PG&E, spent about $35 million to bend politics to their will.

But sure, hate the goofy guy in the vintage Nikes pointing all this out. "I'm proud of the enemies we made," Steyer said in his concession. "In this race, those corporations revealed that they see a government that puts working people first as an existential threat — even when proposed by a billionaire. By spending $55 million — the most ever against a single candidate in a California primary — they showed the lengths they would go to in order to protect a status quo that only serves them and their profits." I don't like the amount of money in our political system either, but the truth is, it's there. And worse, the majority of those who have it seem intent on diminishing the political and economic power of those who don't.

We are increasingly moving toward a country where the well-being of the majority of people will depend on the largesse of the few — Silicon Valley's tech industry now talks about a universal basic income as a great boon for the coming mass unemployment they are creating.

But is existence off a charity-pittance really what we want for ourselves and our children?