Gavin Newsom literally started his career with funding from a billionaire, but he was also raised by a single mother with 3 jobs

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...