Sergey Brin’s $102 million helped sink California’s billionaire tax and may block the next one
Its sponsor, Building a Better California, is a political committee largely funded by Google co-founder Sergey Brin, who gave it $102 million.
Key points
- The New York Times reported that venture capitalist Peter Thiel and Google co-founder Larry Page were considering leaving, and Fortune reported in January that Page and Brin were cutting ties with California.
- Reporting by the New York Times and CalMatters has shown that Propositions 41 and 42 were designed to nullify Proposition 40: had the billionaire tax passed, it would have been voided if either rival measure won more votes.
- Billionaires threatened to leave and spent heavily anyway Many of the billionaires who backed Proposition 42 warned that a billionaire tax would drive the state’s wealthiest business leaders away.
The committee put more than $300 million into defeating Proposition 40, the billionaire tax, and passing Propositions 41 and 42, according to the California Fair Political Practices Commission.
The academics who helped write Proposition 40 estimated that California’s billionaires pay about $3 billion a year in state income tax, roughly 2.5% of income tax revenue and about 1% of total state revenue.
Additional details
- Brin, who now lists a Nevada address, has compared the billionaire tax to the Soviet-era socialism he fled as a child.
- California voters rejected a one-time tax on the state’s billionaires last week.
- What Prop 42 puts off-limits Backers outside the billionaire class pitched the measure as protection for ordinary savers, echoing Proposition 40 opponents who warned that taxing billionaires was only the start.
- “It’s a redundant, expensive trick to allow approximately 200 billionaires to keep avoiding paying their own taxes while YOU get stuck with the bill.” California already taxes few assets beyond real estate, which Proposition 13 caps, plus boats, planes, business equipment and vehicles through the vehicle license fee.
- With Proposition 40 defeated, Proposition 42 stands on its own, and its reach goes well beyond the one-time tax it was built to stop.
How this summary was made: extractive summary — built from the sources' own reporting. It is drawn only from the reporting of the sources listed below — read the originals for full detail. How we summarize →
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