The founder of Farallon faces scrutiny as he restructures his multistrategy firm - and his political ambitions mount
By Carolyn Sargent
Standing on stage one evening last November at San Francisco's Mark Hopkins Hotel to accept an Exemplary Community Leadership award, Farallon Capital Management founder Tom Steyer focused first on the obligatory platitudes. "I know that my job is to say thank you to the people here," Steyer said, quickly shifting his remarks to the political arena.
"I want to make one short commercial for an idea," Steyer said, wearing a trademark red plaid tie and acknowledging rather unselfconsciously that his "commercial" was unrelated to his work with a community bank, for which he and his wife were being honored. Criticizing the outgoing Bush administration for lacking a strategy to get out of the financial crisis, Steyer proclaimed that the United States cannot pull out of the economic slump without rehauling...