You may not have heard much about this ongoing battle lately, in part because it's happening in California and also because Gov. Gavin Newsom hasn't said anything about it in at least the past month. But the fight over the California Wealth Tax is still happening.
Now, with the measure qualified for the November ballot, the fight is entering its quintessentially Californian phase as a spectacularly expensive media war unfolds. And some billionaires are ready to spend heavily to convince voters to stop the tax on their assets.
A campaign backed by Sergey Brin, a co-founder of Google, launched its debut ad on Tuesday, the first of what’s set to be more than $90 million worth of initiative spending this year...
The opposition campaign backed by his organization, Building a Better California, began Tuesday with a blue-collar pitch. The first ad emphasizes that unions representing teachers and firefighters oppose the tax, along with the state’s top politicians, including Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat.
Here's the ad:
🚨 NEW: the campaign against the “Billionaire Tax” in California, aka #Prop40, is underway.@VoteNoOn40 is out with its first statewide ad⬇️ pic.twitter.com/dhuDqcQPXy
— Nikki Laurenzo (@NikkiLaurenzo) August 25, 2026
The unions behind this can't compete on the airwaves so they're counting on support from the Democrat Party.
The campaign supporting the tax, however, believes it has a valuable advantage: a network of Democratic Party activists and union members who will help push its message to millions of voters.
“We’re not going to try to compete at all with the billionaires on broadcast television,” said Dave Regan, president of SEIU-United Healthcare Workers West, the union that proposed the billionaire tax. “They have the money. We don’t.”
Meanwhile, Gavin Newsom, despite having a quote in the ad, has barely said anything about this lately, almost as if he's trying to hide while it all shakes out.
The big lie in this campaign is the claim that this is a one-time tax. That may be what this vote sets up but supporters have already talked about it being a test run for a repeated wealth tax. And obviously if this passes all of the money raised will be spent within a few years and the union will be demanding more. But this is one case where the media seems studiously incurious about what the long term plan is.
The other thing the media continues to sidestep is that three of the richest men in the world have already left California because of the wealth tax. That includes Sergey Brin whose wealth is probably about an eighth of all the money the wealth tax was targeting.
Brin recently moved to the Nevada side of Lake Tahoe. Critics of the tax say there will only be more billionaires leaving California if voters pass the measure.
Union leader Regan calls Brin's move political theater. He pointed out that the wealth tax applies to California residents who lived in the state in January of this year, so moving out of state would not allow anyone to dodge the tax, nor would relocating after November, if the ballot measure prevails. Bloomberg estimated the tax could personally cost Brin around $13 billion.
Regan said Brin owes his success in part to government-backed research that helped create Google and insisted that a one-time 5% tax would not be overly burdensome for the tech mogul.
Regan keeps saying this but Brin left the state before January 1 of this year so they are not going to get any of his money whether this passes or not. It's also not clear if a retroactive tax is constitutional which means many more people could get out of this before it takes effect. That battle will play out in court if this passes.
I'm keeping my fingers crossed that there are still enough sensible people in California to reject this cash grab, but it's going to be a close thing according to the polls. Lots of people here seem to be fine with the idea of seizing other people's ownership in businesses they built.
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