Tom Steyer has the sort of pedigree that’s been successful in American politics for generations. : The son of a lawyer, he was raised on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, attended boarding schools and then Yale and Stanford universities. He learned merger arbitrage at Goldman Sachs Group Inc. under the tutelage of future U.S. Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, before starting his own hedge fund. He grew San Francisco-based Farallon Capital Management into one of the world’s most successful investment managers, skillfully navigating the 1987 market crash and notching a steady average annual return of 17% for two decades.