The billionaire Tom Steyer seemed to have piqued the curiosity of online influencer Jason Chu.
In a February video shared with his combined 130,000 followers across Instagram and TikTok, Chu ran through the California gubernatorial candidate’s hedge-fund career to assess if he was a “guy that woke up to the damage his company helped cause, and is now spending his money undoing it.”
What Chu didn’t say, however, was that he was paid $2,000 for “online communications” by a media contractor on behalf of Steyer’s campaign, state election finance records show. Chu, who predominantly posts videos about Asian culture and history, did not respond to requests for comment. The video has been watched more than 10,000 times.
The video is part of a months-long social media blitz pushed by Steyer’s campaign as it tries to frame the 68-year-old Democratic financier as a likable billionaire best skilled to win the state’s most powerful role.
Amid a competitive race, Steyer’s campaign has paid thousands of dollars to individual influencers who have championed his progressive policies and financial bona fides, campaign finance records show.
The move has prompted a state investigation into “potential violations of the advertisement disclaimer provisions of the Political Reform Act,” according to a letter sent Tuesday to Steyer and one of the influencers who had touted his candidacy. The letter was shared with The Washington Post by a spokeswoman for California’s Fair Political Practices Commission, which oversees campaign financing.
A 2023 provision in the state’s Political Reform Act requires online creators to include a disclaimer in cases where they were paid for “the purpose of supporting or opposing a candidate for elective office.”
Beatrice Gomberg, a California resident and online creator who filed a complaint along with another California-based creator, Kaitlyn Hennessy, said in an interview that Steyer’s strategy seemed designed to mislead voters into believing that the influencers were driven purely by their support of his candidacy and beliefs.
“He is trying to create the appearance of a grassroots movement, but artificially, in a way that’s very deceptive,” said Gomberg, who supports the former Health secretary Xavier Becerra, one of Steyer’s competitors in the race. “It’s all made up to promote him as this ‘ethical billionaire.’”
Kevin Liao, a spokesman for Steyer’s campaign, said in a statement “the campaign believes in compensating people for their time and work product,” that it discloses the payments in campaign finance reports and that it notifies “creators we directly work with of their disclosure requirements.”
Of Gomberg and Hennessy’s complaint, Liao told The Post the campaign is “confident it is baseless.”
Gutsy Media, the contractor listed in finance records as paying Chu on the campaign’s behalf, did not respond to requests for comment. Steyer’s campaign has paid Gutsy Media, which describes itself as a “full-service strategy and storytelling studio,” more than $300,000 for “production services,” “digital consulting” and other expenses, finance records show.
The Sacramento Bee first reported some details of the payouts.
Steyer made his fortune at a hedge fund, Farallon Capital Management, before shifting nearly 15 years ago to spending millions on climate change and progressive causes.
Steyer has held invite-only events with creators and spoken publicly about the difficulty of capturing liberal voters skeptical of his background and wealth, telling The Post in an interview that his biggest challenge would be to convince people that “a billionaire actually cares about them.”
Federal law requires influencers to offer a “clear and conspicuous” disclosure when they promote a commercial product, per rules enforced by the Federal Trade Commission. But those rules don’t apply to political content, creating a gray area that former right-wing influencers and election-reform advocates have argued increases the risk that voters could be deceived by what they see online.
While California does require a disclosure for election-related content, some prominent pro-Steyer videos included no such disclaimer. In one video, Isaiah Washington, an influencer with 1.8 million TikTok followers, interviewed Steyer and said he “was a vibe” and had “benefited greatly” from capitalism in his life.
Saying young people had been “scorned by capitalism,” Washington asked Steyer in the video, “How are you planning on gaining the trust of people who maybe are against the things you’ve succeeded at really well?”
Washington was paid $10,000 by Steyer’s campaign, finance records show, but did not disclose the payment in online posts reviewed by The Post. The video has since been removed. Washington did not respond to requests for comment.
Smaller creators have also been encouraged to post on Steyer’s behalf. In a job listing on SideShift, a platform where influencers can get paid for marketing campaigns, creators were told they can get paid $10 a post for posting one to three times a day in support of Steyer, with added bonuses for videos that get more than a hundred thousand views.
The listing — categorized as “High Volume UGC,” or user generated content — says creators “will have obligations to include disclaimers in media they produce under this offer” and cites the California law. The listing was revised late Thursday to change the offer to $1,000 a month.
The listing links to three example posts, including a video by the Los Angeles creator Nick Renteria, who said he was initially resistant to Steyer’s candidacy but had changed his mind. “On paper, if you remove the billionaire part, he is a great candidate,” Renteria said.
In an interview, Renteria said he had made the video on his own, without payment or involvement from the campaign, but felt it was “a little bit icky” that the listing had included his video without his knowledge or consent.
The Steyer campaign has since reached out to offer him opportunities to meet with the candidate and create more content, Renteria said, but he has so far declined, saying he is more focused on creating local content and is “not a full-blown, crazy Steyer-head.”
He also said he felt the $10-a-post payment scale greatly discounted what it was asking creators to make. “Anyone who’s worth their salt is not taking $10 to sell out,” he said. “That’s not even minimum wage.”
Some influencers who posted pro-Steyer videos, and who campaign filings said were paid more than $2,000 each from the Steyer campaign via Gutsy Media, wrote in their videos that they had been made “in partnership with Steyer for Governor 2026.”
Gomberg and Hennessy’s complaint alleges that dozens of accounts have been paid to produce content “using the Steyer campaign’s talking points to support his candidacy and attack his opponents,” according to a copy of the complaint they shared with The Post.
In an interview, Gomberg and Hennessy said the SideShift listing, which told payout recipients to create new TikTok and Instagram accounts for the posts and offered to give them “content formats / examples to post about,” presented proof that the campaign’s main goal was to inflate perceptions of Steyer’s voter support.
Both women said while they support Becerra, they were motivated to speak out over anger at what they believed was a campaign tactic that could corrode trust in elections beyond their state.
“This is much, much larger than Tom Steyer,” Hennessy said. “When you have 10,000 people following you, you have a responsibility to be honest with your audience … about where your money is coming from.”
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