Control of Congress is the biggest issue at stake in November’s elections. A close second might be the fight over a ballot initiative in California, Proposition 40, that seeks to impose a wealth tax on the state’s roughly 250 billionaires. If approved, it will be the world’s first billionaire tax.
At a town hall in August, one of its chief proponents, Representative Ro Khanna, whose district encompasses much of Silicon Valley, asked how many in the audience were in favor of the measure. Dozens of hands quickly shot up — an overwhelming majority of those in the room. That Proposition 40 enjoyed such strong support was telling. Even here, in one of the most affluent parts of the country, anger over economic inequality was at a boil.
Khanna played to the populist fury that evening, making light of the fact that none of the billionaires who vociferously oppose the tax were present. “They expect a one-on-one meeting. They expect you to go drive to them,” he said mockingly. “How dare they actually be a commoner and sit in a seat in a town hall and wait to be called on!”
Khanna, a 50-year-old Democrat running for a sixth term, had easily fended off a primary challenge in June from a tech entrepreneur who was against Proposition 40. But when I spoke with him before the town hall, Khanna said his endorsement of the tax had been politically costly in other ways. “I’ve lost at least 20 percent of my donor base,” he said. That included several tech billionaires who had previously contributed to his campaigns. It puzzled Khanna that they couldn’t recognize what seemed self-evident to him: that the tax was actually in their best interest.
Khanna recalled that when he was growing up, people like Steve Jobs and Lee Iacocca were seen as heroes. But now, tech barons and other business leaders are widely loathed. “Eric Schmidt’s getting booed at commencements,” he said of the former chief executive of Google.
In his view, the wealth tax — a one-time 5 percent fee on total worldwide assets — is modest and a small price to pay if it helps blunt some of the rage directed at billionaires. Khanna’s message to them was simple: Read the room. “Mamdani or the next generation want your heads,” he said. “They are coming with pitchforks.”
Michael Moritz, a Silicon Valley titan, is acutely aware of how unpopular he and other billionaires are. “Every time I see a story with ‘billionaire’ in the headline, I know it is meant as a swipe,” he told me when I visited him at his San Francisco home the following day. Billionaires, he said, “have become piñatas for politicians.”
A former venture capitalist, Moritz backed many notable start-ups, including Google, and has an estimated net worth of around $8 billion. As we talked in his living room, which offered a panoramic view of San Francisco Bay and the Marin headlands, he acknowledged that economic inequality was a major problem and said America’s wealth gap “needs to be narrowed in some manner.” To that end, he said he favored eliminating the loopholes that enable the ultrarich to substantially reduce their tax burdens. But he was adamant that Proposition 40 amounted to “asset seizure” and was rooted in resentment and spite. “California, sadly, has become a state that doesn’t value success anymore,” he said.
Moritz was certain that the billionaire tax, if enacted, would leave California worse off. “It’s only going to wind up, in my opinion, hurting the people that they’re trying to help,” he said, predicting that many of the state’s highest earners would flee, eroding California’s tax base. He personally would not join any exodus, but that was only because of his age. “I’m going to be 73 next month,” he said. “Our kids are here. I think if I was 30 years younger and I was running a successful company, I’d probably move.”
Sergey Brin, the Google co-founder, may have already left. Late last year, he bought a mansion on the Nevada side of Lake Tahoe, apparently to escape the possible tax. But he is also now leading the fight in California against Proposition 40 and has committed more than $100 million to that effort. In April, he explained to The Times why he was so determined to defeat the ballot measure. “I fled socialism with my family in 1979 and know the devastating, oppressive society it created in the Soviet Union,” said Brin, who is 53. “I don’t want California to end up in the same place.”
While Proposition 40 has galvanized Brin and other billionaires, it has divided California Democrats. Khanna’s ardent support for the tax has put him at odds with Gov. Gavin Newsom, who tried to prevent it from reaching the ballot. Newsom’s likely successor as governor, Xavier Becerra, who served as health secretary in the Biden administration, is also opposed to the tax.
Progressives and Democratic-aligned organizations are split, too, even though an “eat the rich” sentiment runs strong on the left. One of the main sticking points is how the revenue would be spent. Proposition 40 is sponsored by California’s largest health care workers’ union, and most of the $100 billion it is projected to raise will go to health care programs imperiled by federal cuts.
A number of advocacy groups think the money should be disbursed more widely and have refused to back the measure. These disagreements have been exacerbated, it seems, by the health care union’s president, Dave Regan, a polarizing figure known for his aggressive tactics as well as his frequent involvement with ballot initiatives (nearly 50 since 2009, according to Politico).
If Regan is the political muscle behind Proposition 40, the brains behind it are a pair of French economists, Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman. Both are on the faculty at the University of California, Berkeley, and have devoted their careers to studying inequality and tax avoidance by the rich. They served as informal advisers to Senator Elizabeth Warren when she ran for president in 2020, and policymakers here and abroad regularly consult with them.
Saez and Zucman believe that we are living in a second Gilded Age; that the extreme concentration of wealth at the very top is as much a political calamity as it is an economic injustice; and that reining in the fortunes and influence of billionaires and multimillionaires is imperative. To them, Proposition 40 is a referendum on the allocation of wealth in the United States but also the distribution of power. As Saez puts it, “Are we still a democracy, or are we going to be an oligarchy?”
He and other supporters of Proposition 40 think it could be a bellwether, heralding a shift away from the untrammeled capitalism that has enabled a small group of individuals to amass outlandishly large fortunes. They cite as precedent an earlier upheaval that also began in California. In 1978, the state’s voters approved Proposition 13, which placed a cap on property taxes. That so-called tax-revolt initiative presaged Ronald Reagan’s election as president in 1980 and was arguably the first shot in the Reagan Revolution. Now, nearly a half-century later, Californians will be voting on a measure that its architects hope will lead to another reordering of American economic and political life — this time in favor of the have-nots and the left behind.
The One Big Beautiful Bill Act, championed and signed by President Trump last year, included tax cuts that were partly offset by sharp reductions in social programs. California stands to lose around $100 billion in federal Medicaid funding over the next five years, threatening health care coverage for millions of low-income residents, as well as the potential closure of hospitals and other facilities. To guard against these outcomes and help protect the livelihoods of caregivers, Regan’s union, the Services Employees International Union-United Healthcare Workers West, which has 120,000 members, sponsored Proposition 40. But the idea of a California wealth tax originated with a different trade union during the pandemic.
With the U.S. economy in lockdown, there was grave concern about the fiscal impact at the state level. Anticipating a budget crunch and fearing job losses and pay cuts, the California Federation of Teachers reached out to Saez and Zucman in the spring of 2020 to see if they could help devise a tax that might make up for any shortfall. The two economists had been working with the Warren campaign. They had also recently published a book, “The Triumph of Injustice: How the Rich Dodge Taxes and How to Make Them Pay,” which made the case for a global wealth tax.
Saez, who is 53, earned his doctorate at M.I.T. and joined the Berkeley faculty in 2002. His interest in wealth and inequality only grew after he relocated to Northern California. “You had homeless people in the streets here in Berkeley, close to this booming Silicon Valley, in a way that was shocking,” he recalls. Zucman, who is 39, was hired by Berkeley in 2015. While he remains on the faculty there, he is now at the Paris School of Economics during the academic year. Saez and Zucman have each won the John Bates Clark Medal, the second most prestigious honor in economics and often a precursor to the most prestigious: the Nobel Prize.
The pair had provided input to Warren on the federal wealth-tax plan that became a centerpiece of her White House bid. Senator Bernie Sanders, who was also running for president in 2020, likewise sought their counsel when he was developing a wealth-tax proposal of his own. Warren and Sanders prompted a national conversation around wealth taxes and helped make Zucman and Saez stars in the policy world. Critics contend that they overstate the extent of our current inequality and that their research suffers from methodological flaws and ideological bias. Saez and Zucman vigorously dispute those charges, and their principal claim — that the fortunes of the superrich have exploded and that most of this wealth goes untaxed — seems incontestable.
Any serious debate about the tax question was put to rest in 2021, when the I.R.S. documents of some of America’s best-known billionaires were obtained and published by ProPublica. What they revealed was startling. Amazon’s founder, Jeff Bezos, to take one example, saw his net worth increase by almost $100 billion from 2014 to 2018. During that same period, he declared total income of $4.22 billion, on which he paid $973 million in federal taxes. What ProPublica called his “true” tax rate — the rate that Bezos paid on all the wealth he accrued during this period — was just 0.98 percent.
Bezos was able to pay so little because most of his wealth consisted of Amazon stock, and under the U.S. tax code, his gains are taxed only if he sells shares. But because billionaires can fund their lifestyles by borrowing against their assets, they have little need to ever unload the stocks they own (and it’s worth noting that the money they borrow isn’t taxed, either). Moreover, if Bezos gifts his Amazon holdings to his heirs, his gains will never be taxed, and unless his beneficiaries sell, gains that they subsequently enjoy won’t be taxed, either.
“The tax system has become very efficient at leaving out the types of wealth that the wealthy have,” says Ray Madoff, a Boston College law professor and the author of a recently published book titled “The Second Estate: How the Tax Code Made an American Aristocracy.” “We’re letting massive amounts of wealth go untaxed.”
What’s true at the federal level is also true at the state level. According to Saez and Zucman, neither Sergey Brin nor Larry Page, the Google co-founders, paid any California income tax on their Google wealth in 2019, 2020 and 2023, even though the combined value of their stakes in the company increased by more than $60 billion. Brin and Page weren’t cheating the system; they were simply benefiting from it. During those three years, neither of them took a salary from Google, nor did they sell any Google shares or receive any dividend payments. Their net worth soared because of their Google stock, but because they didn’t draw any income from the company, they paid no income tax on the added wealth that they derived from Google.
After Saez and Zucman agreed to help the California Federation of Teachers in 2020, they recruited two law professors who specialize in tax policy, David Gamage and Darien Shanske, to assist them in drafting a wealth tax. (Another law professor, Brian Galle, who teaches at Berkeley, later joined the effort.) The group came up with a plan for a one-time 0.4 percent tax on the net worth of all Californians with more than $30 million in assets excluding real estate holdings. They left those out in order to comply with restrictions imposed by Proposition 13 that are still in place; for the same reason, real estate is also excluded from the billionaire tax. Rob Bonta, now California’s attorney general but at the time a state assemblyman, sponsored a bill to establish the tax. But it never came to a vote, in part because California weathered the pandemic better than expected.
Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill brought renewed interest to the tax that Zucman, Saez and their colleagues had designed, this time from the health care workers’ union. As Saez recalls, “Dave Regan came in and said: We have an emergency. We need revenue.”
The two economists and the trio of law professors revived the 2020 wealth tax, but with a twist: They believed that California could raise the $100 billion needed to make up for federal cuts with a one-time wealth tax applied to a much smaller segment of the state’s population: its 250 or so billionaires. The tax could be limited to them because their wealth had exploded in recent years. Brin was worth $49 billion in 2020, according to Forbes. Since then, Google’s stock has roughly quintupled, and he is now worth around $237 billion. Page has done even better: Since 2020, his net worth has jumped to more than $280 billion, from $50 billion.
A few months ago, Bezos was interviewed on CNBC and grew testy when asked about his tax bill. “You could double the taxes I pay,” he said, “and it’s not going to help that teacher in Queens, I promise you.” Zucman and Saez say that is flatly untrue. In an age of centibillionaires, taxing even just a fraction of their aggregate wealth would make a material difference to society. “The revenue implications would be large,” Zucman says.
He cites California as an example. The billionaires who reside there now have a combined net worth of $2.4 trillion, equivalent to about half the state’s G.D.P. (and California by itself is the world’s fifth-biggest economy). If Proposition 40 passes and the tax yields the projected $100 billion in revenue, the total net worth of those billionaires will decline to just under $2.3 trillion. What amounts to a rounding error for them could preserve health care coverage for millions.
Saez admits that levying the tax only on billionaires was a strategic choice. As he dryly observes, “They are no longer very popular.” Regan told me that when his union conducted focus groups before rolling out Proposition 40, the idea of targeting billionaires generated marked enthusiasm. “That made a difference to voters,” he says. To get the measure on the ballot, the union had to obtain 874,641 signatures. It ended up with 1.6 million.
Regan insists that his goal is not to take down billionaires. “The mission was, How do we prevent the collapse of the health care system?” he says. “We’re not trying to win a debate about the rightness or wrongness of billionaire wealth.” Tapping that wealth, though, was an obvious solution to an urgent problem. “It’s the Willie Sutton thing,” Regan says. “Why do I rob banks? Because that’s where the money is.”
At a holiday party last year hosted by Chris Larsen, a crypto billionaire, Brin took Newsom aside to complain about the tax that Regan’s union was seeking to put on the ballot. Brin and the governor were old friends who attended each other’s weddings, but according to an account in The Times, Brin made his indignation clear.
Around the same time, Brin expressed his displeasure in another way: He purchased a $42 million mansion in Incline Village, Nev. Brin also began organizing an effort to defeat Proposition 40. He enlisted the support of other billionaires, among them Michael Moritz, Eric Schmidt and John Doerr, and helped start a nonprofit called Building a Better California, which has now turned a fire hose of money against Proposition 40.
Building a Better California is pursuing a multipronged strategy. It succeeded in putting two other measures before the voters, Propositions 41 and 42. The goal, it appears, was to make a crowded ballot even more confusing: There are now 14 different initiatives under consideration this November. But Propositions 41 and 42 also contain provisions that would effectively prohibit California from introducing a wealth tax, and if either one gets more votes than Proposition 40, it will prevail even if 40 is approved. (Newsom has endorsed Proposition 42.) Building a Better California is spending tens of millions of dollars on ads in support of Propositions 41 and 42. Along with other groups, it is also waging a frontal assault on the wealth tax, flooding the airwaves and social media feeds with ads denouncing it.
Not every California billionaire opposes Proposition 40. In January, Nvidia’s chief executive, Jensen Huang, whose net worth has soared to around $200 billion on the back of the A.I. revolution, told Bloomberg that he was “perfectly fine” with the tax.
But Huang is an outlier, especially in Silicon Valley, where the overwhelming reaction has been one of anger and alarm. A source of particular consternation is that the tax will apply to “paper” billionaires — to the heads of start-ups that haven’t yet gone public but whose personal wealth, by virtue of their ownership stakes, is valued in excess of $1 billion. The argument against taxing them as “real” billionaires is that they may not have cash on hand to pay and that the valuations are just well-educated guesstimates.
In August, Ro Khanna addressed this issue on X, saying that those short on cash could borrow money from the state to pay the tax, pledging shares in their companies as collateral. This drew a furious response from the billionaire Mark Cuban, who called the idea “insane.” Cuban, a resident of Texas, claimed that it would destroy the growth prospects of new companies. If Proposition 40 passed, he wrote on X, “only idiot startup founders stay in Cali.”
Garry Tan, the chief executive of Y Combinator, which funds and advises tech start-ups, was equally caustic when I spoke with him recently. “These are speculative start-ups,” he told me. “Markets can shift very quickly. You can bankrupt a founder.” Tan, although not a billionaire himself, is close to many of Silicon Valley’s leading figures. He suggested that Proposition 40 was “targeting tech in a very fundamental way” and would crush California’s entrepreneurial spirit if it became law. “I think we’re on the verge of strangling the golden goose,” Tan said.
The academics who designed the wealth tax contend that the objections of Tan and Cuban amount to a red herring. They point out that “paper” billionaires, like “true” billionaires, are able to borrow against their assets to cover living expenses. If they are treated like billionaires by banks and other financial institutions, the argument goes, they should be by the state too. Proposition 40 also gives individuals who are subject to the tax the option of paying it over a five-year period. In addition, Zucman notes, start-up founders who have more than 95 percent of their net worth tied up in a business can defer payment until the company has a “liquidity event” (that is, goes public or issues dividends).
Proposition 40 supporters accuse the tech community of fear-mongering. They insist that a one-time tax imposed on just 250 people is highly unlikely to destroy the advantages that Silicon Valley has built up over decades. During his town hall, Khanna cited data showing that 85 percent of recent U.S. venture-capital investment went to businesses in California. He said this was because “we have all the talent that’s leading to the A.I. revolution” and predicted that a “vast majority” of California’s billionaires would stay even if Proposition 40 was approved.
But part of the reason people in tech circles are issuing such apocalyptic warnings is that they don’t believe that the wealth tax would be just a one-time event. “Have you ever heard of a one-time tax?” Moritz asked me. The skepticism is not unwarranted: This year, Khanna sponsored a bill with Sanders to establish an annual federal wealth tax, and Zucman and Saez have made clear that they see Proposition 40 as only a start. A widely shared view in Silicon Valley is that the billionaire tax, if it goes into effect, will be made permanent and that the dynamism that birthed Apple, Google and other era-defining companies will migrate to places like Miami and Austin, Texas.
That’s exactly what Newsom has said he fears. A few weeks after his encounter with Brin at the holiday party, the governor announced that he, too, was against Proposition 40. “This will be defeated,” he told The Times in January. “There’s no question in my mind.” He added, “I’ll do what I have to do to protect the state.” According to Regan, Newsom personally pleaded with him in the spring to abandon the proposed tax. But Regan refused, and Newsom failed to stop it from qualifying for the ballot.
For the two-term governor, Proposition 40 has become a tripwire. Newsom has long enjoyed cordial relations with Brin and other tech executives and is eager not to alienate potential donors ahead of a possible presidential run. At the same time, though, the country is seething with economic discontent, and moguls like Brin have become objects of scorn. Being perceived as soft on billionaires is likely to be a political liability for any Democrat seeking the White House.
In June, the day after Proposition 40 was formally approved for the ballot, Newsom issued a statement reiterating his opposition to the measure but also announcing that he was in favor of a national wealth tax. Triangulation, however, didn’t buy him any more sway in the roiling debate over Proposition 40: In August, the executive board of the California Democratic Party defied Newsom and voted to endorse the billionaire tax. (Newsom’s office didn’t respond to requests for an interview.)
Prominent California Democrats who are also dubious of Proposition 40 include Xavier Becerra and Dan Lurie, San Francisco’s mayor. The state’s U.S. senators, Adam Schiff and Alex Padilla, have declined to take a position on the wealth tax. So, too, another well-known California Democrat, former Vice President Kamala Harris.
Perhaps the biggest source of intrigue, though, is a non-Californian. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, who once wore a “tax the rich” gown to the Met Gala and who has been traveling the country with Sanders on what they’ve named the Fighting Oligarchy Tour. In August, Regan publicly encouraged her to get behind Proposition 40, but she has yet to do so.
One reason might be that organized labor as well as progressive advocacy groups are divided over the measure. While many of them support Proposition 40, it has also drawn notable opposition. Planned Parenthood Affiliates of California and the N.A.A.C.P. California Hawaii are both against it. So, too, is the California Teachers Association. The C.T.A., which has around 300,000 members, is sponsoring a different ballot initiative, Proposition 3, that would extend current California income tax rates for high earners in order to fund public education and community colleges. Its president, David Goldberg, says that his organization wanted to prioritize Proposition 3.
But he acknowledges that the C.T.A. also has misgivings about Proposition 40. One issue is that it earmarks almost nothing for education. Another is that it won’t generate sustained revenue. Goldberg says that waging a bloody fight over a one-time tax isn’t worth the political capital. “We’re taking on the wealthiest people in the history of the world,” he says, “and we have to be tactically really smart.”
Goldberg went on to tell me that Regan hadn’t helped his cause. According to Goldberg, Regan met with two of his colleagues via Zoom in September in the hope of persuading the C.T.A. to back Proposition 40. “It was a very disrespectful meeting in a lot of ways, frankly,” Goldberg says. “He ended up just hanging up on them.” (Regan’s spokeswoman says he wasn’t angry; the two sides simply disagreed, and the meeting ended.)
Regan’s personal conduct has become an issue in the campaign. Last month, several California news organizations reported that Regan has been accused of using threats and coercion to try to force other labor leaders to support Proposition 40. They also cited allegations that he had a history of resorting to verbal and physical intimidation. Regan denies these claims and says they are a smear campaign orchestrated by his billionaire opponents.
Billionaires aren’t his only detractors at the moment, however. Katie Porter, a former California congresswoman who earned a reputation as a progressive stalwart during her six years in Washington, told me that Proposition 40 was “another ill-conceived, rushed Dave Regan special.” She, too, was troubled by the one-time nature of the tax and the outsize allocation of money to health care and suggested that it was little more than a gimmicky response to profoundly serious public policy issues. “I am a certified Proposition 40 hater,” Porter told me. “It plays on — in a very facile and dangerous way — righteous political anger and deep economic anxiety.”
In her view, it was a lose-lose proposition. If the ballot measure is defeated, it will convince many Americans that the power of billionaires is unassailable, which will make it harder to muster support for more ambitious efforts to tackle inequality. And conversely, if it passes and proves to be a bust for one reason or another, which Porter fears will be the case, it will be a heavy blow for the progressive movement. If a billionaire tax enacted in a state that is “home to one of every six Americans” were to fail, she said, it would “tremendously set back the cause of progressive solutions for our economy. It will be devastating.”
Recent history offers arguably the most persuasive case against Proposition 40. In 1990, a dozen European countries had wealth taxes. Now, only three do. Saez and Zucman’s native France had a particularly long and vexed experiment with a wealth tax before finally jettisoning it. First introduced in 1981, it came to be known as the I.S.F., which stood for impôt de solidarité sur les fortunes, or the solidarity tax on wealth. But a popular quip was that the initials stood for invitation à sortir de France, or the invitation to leave France, and in the more than three decades that the tax was in effect, many French citizens did leave, at some cost to the economy. It was eliminated in 2017.
Saez and Zucman have closely studied France’s failed wealth tax. As they see it, one major design flaw was that its threshold was too low: It applied to households with a minimum net worth equivalent to about 1 million euros. But that pulled in a lot of people whose wealth was tied up in their homes or apartments, and the tax was a hardship for many of them. At the same time, it was riddled with loopholes that allowed the superrich to avoid paying it. Anyone who owned 25 percent or more of a business, for instance, was not subject to the tax. “The French experience with wealth taxation is precisely what you don’t want to do,” Saez told me.
He and other proponents of the California billionaire tax are confident that it will succeed where others failed because it contains no exemptions, applies to only a small number of people and will be difficult if not impossible to evade. Brian Galle, the Berkeley law professor who helped write the tax, says that because it will be retroactively effective to Jan. 1 of this year, any billionaire whose primary residence was in California at that time would have to pay.
Even someone who slipped away just ahead of that date will have a hard time dodging the tax, according to Galle, who cites Brin as an example. To avoid paying, Brin would have to convince the California Franchise Tax Board that his life was truly anchored in Nevada when the tax was introduced. But given that he acquired the Tahoe property only in December, that might be tough to prove. “Spending time in your fifth vacation home does not a Nevada resident make,” Galle says. (Brin did not respond to requests for comment.)
As part of the drafting process, Galle and his colleagues consulted with the F.T.B. and came away confident that it would be able to enforce the tax efficiently and comprehensively. One reason for their confidence: Around 65 percent of the total wealth of California’s billionaires is held in publicly traded stocks. For the four wealthiest — Brin, Page, Huang and Mark Zuckerberg, who now have a combined net worth of nearly $1 trillion — it approaches 100 percent. Tallying up the fortunes of extraordinarily rich people can be difficult because they often own things that are hard to value precisely, such as rare artwork, and also because their businesses and side ventures are sometimes structured in opaque ways. The fact, though, that most of the wealth of California’s billionaires is tied up in publicly traded assets should make the job of the tax board easier. It would presumably also make it easier to withstand challenges from billionaires disputing their tax assessments.
If Proposition 40 passes, it will undoubtedly be challenged on constitutional grounds. Two years ago, in Moore v. United States, the Supreme Court indicated that it would strike down a federal wealth tax if one were enacted. But Galle notes that in a separate opinion, Justice Clarence Thomas said that federal restrictions on taxing unrealized gains didn’t apply at the state level, which seemed to suggest that he, at least, was open to the idea of state-administered wealth taxes like the one California is considering. Galle was heartened by Thomas’s reading of the laws but is taking nothing for granted: While he doesn’t think there is a plausible case to be made that Proposition 40 is unconstitutional, he says the current Supreme Court is nothing if not unpredictable. “If you had any court other than this one, I’d have 99.9 percent certainty,” he says.
But before it can reach the Supreme Court, the tax has to be approved by voters, and the outcome is far from certain. On the same day that he held the town hall meeting, Khanna joined Regan for a Proposition 40 rally at a union office in San Jose. Khanna lauded Regan as “a national hero” for getting the measure on the ballot and said that if it prevailed in November, it would be “a shot heard around the nation and the world.” But he conceded that it was going to be a tough battle. “We would win in a landslide if it weren’t for one thing,” Khanna said. “Well, guess what the one thing is? The money.”
The money seems to be having an impact. In March, The Los Angeles Times commissioned a poll by the Institute of Governmental Studies at U.C.-Berkeley that found overwhelming support for the wealth tax: Of the 5,019 registered voters who were surveyed, 52 percent favored it, with just 33 percent opposed. But when a similar poll was conducted in early August, the gap had narrowed considerably, with 48 percent supporting the tax and 41 percent against it. By mid-September, the margin had shrunk even more, to 45 percent in favor and 42 percent opposed.
Regan told me that he expected opponents of Proposition 40 to burn through at least $400 million. By contrast, his union had raised just $32 million. But he also suggested that the best advertisement for Proposition 40 was the billionaires themselves. Their aggrieved response to the proposed tax, and the vast sums of money they were spending to defeat the ballot initiative, was likely, he argued, to make people even more inclined to vote for it. “Keep talking, Sergey,” Regan said. “Keep talking, Garry Tan. Keep talking, Peter Thiel, because you guys are not the best messengers.”
Michael Steinberger is a contributing writer for the magazine and the author of “The Philosopher in the Valley: Alex Karp, Palantir and the Rise of the Surveillance State.”
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