The TL;DR
Tech billionaires spent more than $120m fighting California’s Proposition 40, a 5% wealth tax on billionaires heading to the November election, compared to $31m raised by union supporters. Sergey Brin earns $82m and has exported goods out of the region; Doerr, Moritz, Collison, Schmidt, Larsen, Thiel, and others follow. Donation statistics come from filing campaigns with Business Insider.
Silicon Valley billionaires are spending heavily to stop California’s proposed billionaire tax, according to Business Insider’s campaign statistics. Opponents have poured more than $120m into sinking or reducing the measure, almost four times the $31m proposed by union supporters.
Proposition 40 would impose a one-time 5% tax on estates and trusts worth more than $1bn when Californians vote in November. Sponsor SEIU-UHW says the $200 billion federal tax would fund health care, food assistance, and education, while supporters have projected $100bn.
Google founder Sergey Brin is the single biggest donor to the opposition, giving $82m to a committee called Building a Better California. That includes the cut of a $16m check on May 15, per BI, weeks before the voting deadline.
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Brin, who Bloomberg’s index reportedly ranks as the world’s third-richest person at $280 billion, filed for LLCs in California ahead of a critical January deadline. He compared the tax to Soviet socialism, telling The New York Times that he did not want California “keep them in the same place” as his family fled the country.
Kleiner Perkins chairman John Doerr, who wrote Google’s famous first check for $12.5m, is the second largest donor at $10m. Former Sequoia CEO Michael Moritz gave $7.5m and Stripe CEO Patrick Collison $7m, according to documents cited by BI.
Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, a longtime advocate of closer ties between technology and government, was the group’s first post-Brin donor of just over $3m. Ripple chairman Chris Larsen, whose company is a founding partner of the Open USD stablecoin consortium, has given $2.5m and $5m to a separate opposition group modeled after Ripple.
The list continues with Stewart Resnick of Wonderful Company ($2.5m), DoorDash CEO Tony Xu ($2m), Max Levchin of Affirm ($1m), and Daniel Tierny of Wicklow Capital ($500,000). Angel investor Ron Conway gave $100,000 to another group after failing to persuade Governor Gavin Newsom to make a deal that would have kept the measure from coming to a vote.
AI subtitle
Peter Thiel, whose Founders Fund recently raised a $6bn AI bet, took a different route. He gave $3m in December to the political arm of the California Business Roundtable, and the New York Times reports that he spends a lot of time in Argentina.
The war is inseparable from the AI boom that has swelled the fortunes now under threat, and Brin is at the center of Alphabet’s AI strategy. Building a Better California has also pushed rival ballot questions designed to undermine the tax if it passes.
Proponents argue that billionaires enriched in part by public investment could afford a single tax to cover a reformed health budget. Opponents warn of massive flight, valuation chaos, and years of litigation, and Brin’s LLC move ahead of the LLC deadline suggests the flight has already begun.
This is the tech elite who are more likely to meet on Necker Island than fight ballot measures. November will show that $120m can buy a lot.
