Gavin Newsom’s political story has always been a study in contrasts: a young entrepreneur whose first big break came from a billionaire family friend, and a boy raised by a single mother juggling three jobs to keep the lights on. That tension now echoes in California’s bitter fight over a proposed wealth tax on billionaires’ assets, a debate that hits close to home for a governor who sits squarely between privilege and precarity. For now, in this instance, he thinks the billionaires tax is “bad economics” and has vowed to defeat it. A closer look at his career shows billionaires have always been central to his story.
In the early 1990s, Newsom’s career began not at a campaign office, but in a wine shop on San Francisco’s Fillmore Street called PlumpJack, a venture he launched with backing from the Getty fortune. Oil heir and composer Gordon Getty, a close family friend who once said he treated Newsom like a son—just as he had been treated similarly by Newsom’s father. In fact, to call Newsom’s father, William Alfred Newsom III, a lawyer for the Getty family would be an understatement. The future judge once hand-delivered $3 million to the Italian kidnappers of Getty’s grandson, in 1973, CalMatters reported, while noting deep ties also between the Newsom family and other San Francisco political royalty, the Browns and Pelosis.
