California voters reject one-time billionaire wealth tax
Sergey Brin and fellow billionaires spent nearly 425 million dollars on the costliest ballot campaign in state history, the defeated levy would have been collected exactly once
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Supporters hold signs advocating for the Billionaire Tax Now coalition in Los Angeles in April. Photograph: Bloomberg/Getty Images
theguardian.com
California voters have rejected Proposition 40, a one-time five percent tax on the wealth of the state's billionaires. The campaign to defeat it cost nearly 425 million dollars, the most expensive ballot measure fight in California history, and it was financed almost entirely by the people the tax would have reached.
Executives at Google, Palantir, DoorDash, Stripe and Reddit, along with several prominent venture capitalists, funded the opposition. Google co-founder Sergey Brin alone contributed at least 132 million dollars, according to campaign finance filings, and in the first two weeks of October the campaign was spending more than 2.5 million dollars a day. For anyone worth more than a billion dollars, five percent of that wealth is a sum that dwarfs a nine-figure political contribution — and unlike nearly all other campaign spending, this money was spent to keep the donors' own.
The opposition did not merely argue. Two counter-measures appeared on the same ballot: if either Proposition 41 or Proposition 42 drew more yes votes than Proposition 40, the tax would not take effect even if it passed. Proposition 42 went further and would ban taxation of billionaire wealth outright. Supporters called them poison pills; the same donors had financed the insurance policy.
The one-time label carried its own weight. Voters were asked to accept that a state with a long record of temporary taxes that stayed would collect this one and stop. Opponents campaigned on that distrust, branding the levy "an everyone tax," and the structure split the coalition a wealth tax might otherwise have held: Governor Gavin Newsom opposed it, as did both the Democratic and Republican candidates to succeed him, and even Planned Parenthood Affiliates of California, a lobbying branch of a healthcare organization, came out against a measure funding healthcare programs.
Supporters had cast Proposition 40 as an answer to the healthcare cuts in Donald Trump's One Big Beautiful Bill Act, and Bernie Sanders and the California congressman Ro Khanna campaigned for it. The state's major unions backed it. None of it was enough.
Nearly 425 million dollars went into defeating a levy that its own sponsors promised would be collected exactly once.