Gov. Gavin Newsom’s ties to California’s oil industry run deeper than most voters realize, and that history is now colliding with his political future as speculation grows about a potential run for the White House.
The relationship traces back more than 80 years, to a friendship forged when Gordon Getty, son of oil magnate J. Paul Getty, lived with the Newsom family while attending school in San Francisco. That bond carried into the next generation. Newsom’s father, William, went on to work as an attorney for the Getty family’s oil empire, and in 1973 he personally delivered a $2.2 million ransom payment to kidnappers holding J. Paul Getty’s grandson in Italy — an episode he later described simply as “an interesting sort of job.”
The connection deepened further after Gavin Newsom’s parents divorced. Gordon Getty effectively took the young Newsom under his wing, a gesture that mirrored the hospitality the Newsom family had extended to Getty decades before. In his recently published memoir, Newsom writes candidly about growing up caught between two very different worlds — the son of a financially struggling single mother, yet also something of an adopted son within a family whose fortune was built on oil.
The ties between the two families only grew stronger once Jerry Brown, then governor and a Newsom family friend, appointed William Newsom to a judgeship in Placer County in 1975 and later to the state appellate court. While serving as a judge in the 1980s, the elder Newsom played a role in helping change California trust law in a way that allowed Gordon Getty to unlock billions of dollars tied up in the family’s oil trust. When William Newsom left the bench in 1995, he went to work directly for Getty, later acknowledging in an interview that his livelihood depended on the oil fortune.
That fortune also helped launch Gavin Newsom’s business career. In the early 1990s, the Getty trust supplied startup money for a wine venture launched by Newsom and Gordon Getty’s son, Billy. The business, named PlumpJack after an opera Getty had composed, became the foundation of what would grow into Newsom’s broader hospitality and wine empire. In short, without Getty oil money, Newsom’s rise as an entrepreneur — and later as a politician — may never have happened.
Given that history, it was something of a surprise in 2022 when Newsom turned sharply against the very industry that had shaped his family’s fortunes. He accused California refiners of price-gouging drivers at the pump and pushed the Legislature to act. Lawmakers responded with a relatively modest law empowering the California Energy Commission to monitor refinery operations more closely.
At the time, Newsom framed it as a major victory. “There’s a new sheriff in town in California, where we brought Big Oil to their knees,” he declared. The rhetoric was bold, but reality soon complicated the narrative — within months, refiners began warning of plant closures, raising fears of fuel shortages and price spikes across the state.
Facing that possibility, Newsom reversed course. He began urging refiners to stay in California and signed legislation making it easier to permit new oil wells. This year, the California Air Resources Board went further, restructuring the state’s cap-and-trade emissions program — now rebranded as cap-and-invest — in a way that grants refiners free emission allowances meant to keep them operating in the state.
Newsom has praised the overhaul as a pragmatic move to protect energy supplies and jobs. But environmental advocates see it as a betrayal of the state’s climate commitments. Earlier this month, the nonprofit Communities for Better Environment sued the state in Los Angeles, arguing the changes violate the California Environmental Quality Act because regulators failed to properly study the environmental consequences of handing refiners such benefits.
The lawsuit contends that the new rules “lock in decades of subsidies for polluting industries” without the required environmental review that would let policymakers weigh the full impact of the decision.
The dispute lands at a politically delicate moment. The Democratic Party’s progressive wing — which has gained influence in recent election cycles and includes many environmental activists deeply critical of the oil industry — is watching closely. For Newsom, a governor whose family history is intertwined with one of the world’s great oil fortunes, and who has now reversed himself to keep California refineries running, the optics could prove troublesome should he seek the party’s presidential nomination.
Original source: CalMatters
