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Meet Jennifer Siebel Newsom’s Trump-loving billionaire cousin, Tom Siebel: the relative of California governor Gavin Newsom’s wife sold Siebel Systems to Oracle for US$5.8 billion, and launched C3 AI

Gavin Newsom and his wife Jennifer Siebel Newsom have a Trump-supporting relative in tech billionaire Thomas Siebel. Photos: @jennifersiebelnewsom/Instagram; Thomas M. Siebel/LinkedIn
Gavin Newsom and his wife Jennifer Siebel Newsom have a Trump-supporting relative in tech billionaire Thomas Siebel. Photos: @jennifersiebelnewsom/Instagram; Thomas M. Siebel/LinkedIn

California governor Gavin Newsom and his wife Jennifer Siebel Newsom may be Democrats, but that doesn’t mean their families have the same political opinions – Jennifer’s cousin is a Trump supporter

California governor Gavin Newsom and his wife Jennifer Siebel Newsom may be Democrats, but that doesn’t mean their families have the same political opinions.
Jennifer Siebel Newsom’s cousin is a billionaire. Photo: @jennifersiebelnewsom/Instagram
Jennifer Siebel Newsom’s cousin is a billionaire. Photo: @jennifersiebelnewsom/Instagram
In fact, Jennifer Siebel Newsom’s cousin, billionaire Thomas Siebel, happens to be a staunch supporter of Republican president Donald Trump. In September 2024, Tom and his wife Stacey Siebel set up an afternoon fundraiser in the San Francisco Bay Area for Trump, according to the Los Angeles Times. It was reported that donors were asked to cough up as much as US$500,000 per couple for the event. Meanwhile, Tom reportedly donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to Trump’s 2024 campaign. He is only distantly related to Jennifer Siebel Newsom, however, as her second cousin once removed.
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Jennifer Siebel Newsom and her husband, California governor Gavin Newsom. Photo: @jennifersiebelnewsom/Instagram
Jennifer Siebel Newsom and her husband, California governor Gavin Newsom. Photo: @jennifersiebelnewsom/Instagram
While Jennifer Siebel Newsom and Gavin Newsom may have many things in common, their political party of choice wasn’t always one of them. According to SFGate, Jennifer was once a Republican (and her father reportedly remains outspokenly right-wing), while Gavin has always been a Democrat but interestingly, was previously married to Kimberly Guilfoyle. Yes, that Kimberly Guilfoyle.

Here’s what we know about Jennifer Siebel Newsom’s ultra-wealthy cousin.

What does Thomas Siebel do?

Thomas Siebel is a billionaire. Photo: Thomas M. Siebel/LinkedIn
Thomas Siebel is a billionaire. Photo: Thomas M. Siebel/LinkedIn

Thomas Siebel, who also goes by the name Tom, is a billionaire businessman. The 72-year-old was behind the software firm Siebel Systems and sold it to Oracle in 2006 for US$5.8 billion in cash and stock, according to Forbes. In 2009, he built C3 AI, a California-based technology company specialising in enterprise artificial intelligence.

“We began 15 years ago, before AWS, before the Google Cloud, before Azure, and before the GPU, building a software stack that would enable companies we believed that the future would be about elastic cloud computing, big data, Internet of Things, and predictive analytics,” he told Barron’s last June.

He serves on the board of advisers for the Stanford University College of Engineering, the University of Illinois College of Engineering and the University of California at Berkeley College of Engineering. Siebel is also an author, penning the book Digital Transformation: Survive and Thrive in an Era of Mass Extinction that was released in 2019.

How much of C3 AI does Thomas Siebel own?