I & I Editorial BoardAnother billionaire, this time Mark Zuckerberg, has fled the Golden State. There are still plenty left. But the trickle could quickly turn into a flood if voters and lawmakers continue to punish the rich. At what point, one wonders, will it be too late for the state to abandon the path to destruction that it chose to take many years ago?
Zuckerberg follows Peter Thiel, Sergey Brin and Larry Page as recent ex-pats. He and his wife are reportedly relocating in income-tax-free Florida. The exodus is clearly in response to the probability that voters will approve a special tax on billionaires this fall.
Most reports indicate the tax will be a one-time levy of 5% on billionaires. But due “to aggressive design choices and possible drafting errors, the actual rate on taxpayers’ net worth could be dramatically higher,” the Tax Foundation says.
It might also be more lasting than just a single assessment. As we closed out 2025, we warned that “no one should kid themselves about” the tax sunsetting as promised:
California voters approved Proposition 30 in 2012, a ‘temporary tax’ on the state’s high-income earners to underwrite education spending. It was extended in 2016. For now, it will sunset in 2031. But there’s never enough of someone else’s money, so the usual agitators want to make it permanent by placing it on the 2026 ballot in tandem with the Billionaire Tax Act.
Because there’s never enough of other people’s money, we expect that millionaires will be next in line for the shakedown. This is not some irresponsible claim because California tried just a few years to reach deeper into the wealthy’s pockets with a bill that would have hit couples whose net worths exceeded $50 million with an additional tax. Just because it failed, it doesn’t mean that the junior Castro-ites in Sacramento will abandon the idea.
It’s rather demoralizing that in our society, billionaires are demonized. When Robert Reich, now a University of California, Berkeley professor who imparted leftist counsel to past presidents, says he wants the U.S. to drive billionaires “to extinction,” and New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani says “I don’t think we shouldn’t have billionaires,” they are cheered, not jeered, by the products of public education that is dominated by leftist ideology.
In a sane and reasonable world, we would all agree that California — as do all states — needs billionaires. They use their capital to increase wealth all around, create jobs, develop life-enhancing and lifesaving innovations, dream up and build modern conveniences, invest in talented and driven people, manufacture markets that had never before existed and underwrite philanthropy.
Or put another way, “Everything you love about life was either made by God or a billionaire.”
Or put yet another way, the recipients of the redistribution of wealth taken by taxation can do none of those things.
Contrary to the lies constantly dropped on us by Democrats and progressives, billionaires also pay taxes, and after they’ve quit California, they’ll be paying them in other states. To see how destructive this will be, consider that at the federal level, the wealthiest 1% in the country pay 41% of the income taxes, while the top 10% pay 72%. In California, those who earn more than $1 million a year provide roughly 40% of income tax revenues.
California seems destined to find itself in a struggle to retain any part of what it once was. Sure, it can survive if half of its 200 or so billionaires flee. But California was never about survival, it was about opportunity, growth, the future. It can be again, but not until the ideologues who have all the political power are thrown out.
— Written by the I&I Editorial Board
It’s a shame that apparently the geese that laid the golden eggs first had to move to California so that when the billionaire tax was applied those same geese- who were now being shorn-could then leave.
By the time middle class Californians find out what the state government is doing to them-it will be too late: Jobs will be gone; tax money will be gone; billionaires will be gone.
It’s a pity that the California Democratic Party is also not gone; however, I guess that is a good thing-otherwise those nimrods might move to Ohio (where I live).
I can afford to live by a SoCal beach Dana Point.
I worked hard for my money.
You want me to leave that for Ohio?
Philadelphia, a city whose leadership is not unlike the leadership of California, has one way to think in their genes. One way!
Our city already has 124 departments, agencies, committees, etc., and no one knows what half of them do anymore, if half of them ever did anything useful?
We are paying taxes to support employees in those obsolete, redundant and absurd agencies, committees, etc!
So, announcing “an exciting new effort to encourage businesses,” “to cut red tape,” to make life easier for new businesses, our well intentioned Mayor, but genetically a True Democrat, establishes yet another…the 125th…. of these tax paid committees for “White Glove” treatment, etc. Sounds great, but so did the other half of the 124 we still pay for.
“It is so much fun to hire people at taxpayers cost,” Democrats say with such glee!
Why not eliminate half of the 124 departments, agencies and committees which gobble our taxes, go uselessly in circles, and then cut the other red tape in every city department to encourage businesses? Does that make sense?
Could such rational business-like behavior ever be enacted by a Democrat?
Not in my city, brilliant in everything, but its One Way leadership.
All the best,
Gardner A. Cadwalader
Philadelphia
It’s as if Newsome is purposely doing everything he can to turn the state of California into a third world nation.
Along with many billionaires leaving the state under his tenure, California has lost around 400 large companies and corporations that have also left the state directly because of his policies, which has also caused a major exidous (estimates range to about 500,000)of citizens fleeing the state.
Yet the Democrats are touting him as a 2028 presidential candidate. LOL
Having grown up in California it saddens me to see how the Democrat party has dilligently worked to turn it into a third world nation,
STOP VOTING CRAPOCRAT
The real target is not the billionaires, but the vast middle class. Once the state starts taxing total asset values, not just income, all that equity in people’s homes will be exposed to extreme predation.
In California, in my experience, “Temporary” taxes on worthy things like “Education”, “Schools”, “Fire Departments”, “Police” (though not as much of late on that one), and “Roads and Highways”, are never temporary and the money raised never goes to solving the advertised problem. This leads to the same “Temporary” taxes on the ballot to allegedly solve the same problems, on a bi-annual or tri-annual basis. The “voters” are constantly confused because they don’t remember voting for those new taxes, and neither did most other people they know, but the Democrat Supermajority in CA makes sure those ballot initiatives “win” so they get more money every year, year over year, whether by hook or by crook and regardless of what the “voters” “voted” for. California is the ‘Primest’ of Prime Examples of a Criminal Political Industrial Complex, and the rest of the country should be shaking in their boots for fear of any California politician being cheated into the Presidency (ala OBiden). If that ever happens, our billionaires will be relocating to the next closest tax haven that doesn’t have an address in the USA.
Yes, California is self-destructive, we’ve known that for a long time. However, your relaying that Mamdani supposedly said, “I don’t think we shouldn’t have billionaires” can’t be correct. Mamdani may be a clueless Socialist, and he must have said “I don’t think we should have billionaires.” Otherwise the way you reported it, it would be a ridiculous way of saying “I think we should have billionaires,” which is a reasonable, if bland, statement, but not one that he would ever say.