The California Government Wants Your Ass.ets

The proposed "one time, billionaire tax" allows the state to take a slice of everything you own, it's not one time, it's not limited to billionaires and (even)the government accounts say it won't work

Apr 03, 2026

This is a special edition of Different.

Focused on one topic.

A tax change that has the potential to re-shape many American entrepreneurs, startup investors, inventors, developers, builders, and creator capitalists lives.

It will impact everyone in California.

And (too) few people are taking about it.

So, grab something you like to drink, find a place you like to be.

And let’s change the future of California.

California’s proposed “Billionaire Tax” is America’s first proposed asset/wealth tax of its kind. A brand new category of tax.

Not on what you earn. On what you own.

And it’s not limited to billionaires.

And it’s not limited to one time.

And there’s another part of this proposed tax that will genuinely blow your mind.

California: A Category Of One

The weather.

The audacity.

The sheer density of world-changing ideas per square mile.

No place on earth has produced more innovation, more creativity, more category-defining companies. Hollywood. Silicon Valley.

The farms that feed a nation. A startup culture the whole world tries to copy. Art. Music. Wine. Oceans. Mountains.

California is legendary.

That’s exactly why we need to talk about this.

The Tax Proposal

Sacramento wants to create something America has never (quite) seen before.

Not a tax on what you earn.

A tax on what you own.

The 2026 “Billionaire Tax Act” (and remember, taxes are rarely named for what they actually do) would impose a 5% levy on the total net worth of California residents worth over $1 billion. Not their income. Not their gains.

Everything they’ve accumulated.

All of it assessed, priced, and taxed by the state.

For the first time in American history (outside of the death tax… and special situations) government wants to reach into what you’ve already built and cut out a slice.

Call it what it is: an asset seizure tax.

(The state isn’t technically taking 5% of billionaires’ assets. But for people who don’t have 5% of their net worth sitting in cash, the state is effectively forcing the liquidation of assets to collect “their” 5%. Same thing. Tomato. Tomato.)

Now you might be thinking:

I’m not a billionaire. Why do I care?

Oh.

You’re gonna care.

The Math They Hope No One Does

Supporters (people who want more taxes) say this raises $100 billion. Easy money. Problem solved.

Except Stanford’s Hoover Institution actually ran the numbers.

Just six publicly confirmed departures

Larry Page
Sergey Brin
Peter Thiel
Don Hankey
Steven Spielberg
and David Sacks

Larry Page is worth $260 billion. He left because California wanted him to pay them $13 billion.

These six guys have already removed an estimated $536 billion from California’s tax base. Nearly 30% of the entire proposed tax base.

Gone.

Before the initiative even qualified for the ballot.

The real collection estimate if this tax goes through? $40 billion. Less than half of what supporters claimed.

And here’s the kicker. Once you account for the income taxes permanently lost when billionaires leave, Stanford found the net present value of this tax is negative $24.7 billion.

In over 71% of their simulations, California ends up poorer.

This isn’t a tax that solves California’s budget problem.

It accelerates it.

“This tax is billed as one-time. But why would anybody believe it’s a one-time tax?” — Joshua Rauh, Senior Fellow, Stanford Hoover Institution

A Spending Story Disguised as a Tax Story

Here’s the context Sacramento would rather you not have.

California’s total state expenditures have grown by more than 60% in a decade.

From roughly $250 billion to over $400 billion. (Source: NASBO. FY2025 total: $413.8 billion including all funds.)

The state is now projecting a $22 billion deficit by 2027-28.

California’s response?

Not cutting.

(Giving Sacramento more money is like leaving a 16-year-boy old alone with a bottle of bourbon, a bag of pot gummies, and your car keys.)

And here’s where it gets more infuriating.

California’s own Legislative Analyst’s Office (Sacramento’s own independent budget office, not Fox News) concluded this new tax would cause an

“ongoing decrease in state income tax revenues of hundreds of millions of dollars or more per year.”

Even the state’s own accountants say this won’t work.

What Happens When Billionaires Leave?

There are roughly 200 California billionaires. Six have publicly confirmed departures. Way more have actually left. I personally know billionaires who have quietly gone.

Here’s a possible scenario: 100 to 150 leave.

Here’s why that’s not crazy.

The average California billionaire is worth somewhere between $7 and $10 billion.

At 5%, their new asset tax bill: $350 million to $500 million.

Stanford’s Hoover Institution estimates all 200 California billionaires collectively pay somewhere between $3.3 and $5.8 billion in state income taxes annually.

(A modeled estimate, since California doesn’t publish tax data by wealth category.)

That’s about $16 to $29 million per billionaire, per year on average.

Though a handful of the wealthiest pay a wildly disproportionate share, and much of it arrives in lumpy capital gains events rather than steady annual income.

What departures mean is directionally clear. Even if precise numbers are impossible to pin down:

Lose 25 billionaires → $400M–$725M in annual tax revenue. Gone.
Lose 100 billionaires → $1.6B–$2.9B in annual tax revenue. Gone.
Lose 150 billionaires → $2.4B–$4.35B in annual tax revenue. Gone.

While the spending never stops.

Why ranges rather than single numbers:

And the real kicker remains true regardless of which end of the range you use: even the most conservative scenario.

Lose “just” 25 billionaires, lose only $400 million a year. That’s a permanent annual hole that compounds forever. Not a rounding error.

And that’s only income tax.

It doesn’t count capital gains. It doesn’t count what they spend in California. It doesn’t count the companies they would have funded or the people those companies would have hired.

Now that future now belongs to Austin and Miami.

And here’s what crushes even the optimistic scenario.

Even if zero billionaires leave (full compliance, everyone stays, everyone writes the check) the pro-tax economists’ own $100 billion estimate collected over five years equals roughly $20 billion per year.

California’s structural deficit runs $15 to $25 billion annually.The tax might narrow the gap in some years. It doesn’t solve the underlying problem.

It’s one-time asset tax against a permanent over-spending structure.

(Read that three times.)

When the money runs out, the deficit remains.

And that’s before a single billionaire boards a plane.

That’s Why The Asset Tax Is Coming For You

If this passes and billionaires leave (and they are already leaving) the revenue collapses. The structural deficit remains.

If this passes and all billionaires stay, the spending remains. The structural deficit remains.

In all scenarios, Sacramento needs more money.

So what happens next is simple. (And it has happened before.)

The definition expands downward.

The “billionaire tax” becomes an asset tax.

The asset tax reaches millionaires.

The millionaires leave.

The threshold drops. And drops.

Until the asset seizure is knocking on the door of people who right now are nodding along thinking, “Good, tax those billionaires.”

Think about who gets hit next.

The small business owner who spent 20 years building something. The solo consultant whose primary asset is their client book. The creator capitalist whose intellectual capital is their retirement plan. The doctor who built a practice. The farmer whose land has compounded in value for decades.

These aren’t billionaires.

These are the backbone of California’s economy.

And under a permanent asset/wealth tax framework, they’re next.

Think that sounds crazy?

Keep reading.

We’ve Been Misled Before: The Prop 19 Swindle

California voters have been here before.

And been burned.🔥

Proposition 19, passed in November 2020, is one of the great political bait-and-switch jobs in modern California history.

The pitch was clean.

The villain obvious.

Finally (finally) we’d stop wealthy real estate investors from passing down Malibu beach empires while paying property taxes calculated around the moon landing.

Who could be against that?

The proposition was even named “The Home Protection for Seniors, Severely Disabled, Families, and Victims of Wildfire or Natural Disasters Act.”

(Lesson: in modern US politics, assume the name of a bill is the opposite of what it actually does.)

Here’s what voters didn’t fully see.

Prop 19 quietly eliminated the longstanding right to transfer commercial property and rental properties to your children without triggering full tax reassessment.

Before Prop 19, parents could transfer up to $1 million of non-residential property (a small business building, a rental property) to their kids without a tax reset.

Gone.

F*cked.

Family farms got a partial carve-out. But not really.

The next generation must keep actively farming. And the moment the farm’s market value exceeds its original tax base by more than $1 million, reassessment kicks in.

In California, where agricultural land values have gone vertical, that threshold gets cleared before you finish your avo toast.

Families farming the same land for generations (where the paper value has exploded but the actual farming income has stayed brutally thin) suddenly face enormous tax bills on wealth they can’t access.

Without selling.

The land is worth a fortune.

The business running on it isn’t.

That gap is precisely what (now) forces family farms get sold to developers.

(All so California can get mo’ money.)

The small business owner who spent thirty years paying off the building they work in? No exemption. Full reassessment, full stop. Kids can’t afford to keep the family store. What grandma and grandpa spent a lifetime building.

Gone.

F*cked.

Californians walked into voting booths thinking they were sticking it to Malibu mansion owners.

They walked out raising taxes on family farms and corner shops.

The 2026 Billionaire Tax Act is Prop 19 with a much bigger target.

Same playbook.

Appealing villain.

Great bumper sticker.

Buried consequences.

Constitutional changes that outlast the supposed original intent by decades.

If You Build or Create Things of Value: Read This Carefully

This proposition doesn’t just create a tax.

It changes the legal framework that has historically prevented California from taxing intangible personal property.

your stocks
your business stakes
your investment accounts

This new tax is described as one-time.

But the underlying constitutional change does not automatically expire. Once that legal architecture exists, future legislators and ballot initiatives can revisit it, expand it, and lower the threshold.

Without needing to overcome the constitutional barrier that exists today.

Stanford’s Hoover Institution called it:

“constitutional infrastructure for future wealth taxes.”

Could future voters repeal it? Yes. In theory. The same way any constitutional amendment can be undone — with another ballot measure, years of organizing, and tens of millions of dollars.

Here’s the question worth asking: when was the last time California voters rolled back a tax expansion?

The “billionaire tax” could come and go. The legal pathway it creates stays.

They Want To Tax Your Intellectual Capital

Here’s where it gets genuinely wild.

To pass this “billionaire tax,” Sacramento needs to remove the constitutional cap that currently prevents taxing intangible personal property.

Like stocks, private equity, business stakes, intellectual capital.

Today that cap protects everyone.

This proposal removes it.

For billionaires first.

This specific bill targets people worth over $1 billion. The random founder with early startup equity isn’t affected. Today. The pre-revenue company isn’t taxed. Today.

But here’s what is true today.

If you are a California billionaire (or a founder whose stake has crossed that threshold) your intangible assets are now in play.

Your illiquid (paper value) assets are now in play.

The private company stake you can’t sell. The equity that exists only on a cap table. The intellectual capital valued by a spreadsheet rather than a market transaction.

Even if it’s illiquid.

Even if you’ve never seen a dollar from it.

The state will require a valuation. California’s Franchise Tax Board (among the most aggressive tax enforcement agencies in the country) will review your valuations.

Uncertainty changes behavior.

You don’t need aggressive enforcement to drive people out. You just need the question hanging over every founder, builder, creator capitalist, and artist’s head:

If I build something legendary here, will the state assess its value before I’ve seen a dollar?

That question is already being asked loudly. In exactly the circles where California’s next generation of world-changing companies and ideas gets built.

Once a wealth tax framework exists, history shows these policies evolve.

France built one, modified it repeatedly, and eventually scaled it back dramatically. Norway has had one for decades with thresholds and rates shifting with political winds.

The lesson isn’t that wealth taxes always expand.

The lesson is that once the legal scaffolding is in place, the terms are permanently subject to negotiation, political pressure, and whoever needs money next.

California’s structural deficit isn’t going away. The spending commitments aren’t shrinking.

Sacramento has demonstrated it wants what we own. Not just what we earn.

The proposal may target billionaires today. But once the barrier is gone, the question isn’t what this version of the tax does.

The question is what becomes possible the day after it passes.

That’s the question California’s founders, builders, and creator capitalists are already answering.

With their feet.

New York Already Ran An Experiment Like This

You want to see where this road ends?

Drive east.

Not long ago, New York Governor Kathy Hochul was publicly telling people she disagreed with to “jump on a bus and head down to Florida where you belong.”

This March (at a Politico summit) she said: “Maybe the first step should be to go down to Palm Beach and see who we can bring back home, because our tax base has been eroded.”

The same governor who told the rich to leave. Is begging them to return. Because without them, she can’t fund the programs she promised.

New York has lost nearly a million residents since 2020. The wealthy. The middle class. New York now leads the country in outbound migration.

“The problem with socialism is, eventually you run out of other people’s money.” — Margaret Thatcher (still right)

California: New York is your Ghost of Christmas Future.

What This Means For The California We Could Be

California’s greatest export has never been a product.

It’s been a belief.

The idea that if you come here (work, build, create, risk, innovate) this place gives you a shot. A place that welcomes pirates, dreamers, and people crazy enough to go for it.

People in California created marine and wave sanctuaries, national parks, and mainland surfing.

California is the place where a nobody from nowhere can build/do/create something that changes everything.

That belief attracts.

Rockstars and rocket-ship builders.

Movie makers to microchip designers.

That belief attracted many of the most legendary minds in the world to California.

It drove me from Toronto to Silicon Valley. Not just for the American dream. For the California/American dream.

Consider the value that belief created in just five companies.

Nvidia ($4.4T)
Apple ($3.9T)
Alphabet ($3.8T)
Broadcom ($1.4T)
and Meta ($1.3T)

About $15 trillion in combined market value.

Approximately 20% of the entire US stock market.

Five companies. Built in California.

(Market caps as of late March 2026)

Sadly, Hollywood lost 17,000 jobs in 2025.

An 18% single-year increase in losses.

On-location shoot days in Los Angeles hit their lowest level since the pandemic: down 16% from 2024 alone.

And when 150 film and TV executives were surveyed on preferred filming destinations, California ranked sixth. Behind Toronto. The UK. Vancouver. Central Europe. And Australia.

Sixth.

Hollywood was the category king of movie making.

California didn’t remember the old saying, “don’t kill the goose that lays the golden eggs”.

Every founder who decides to build in Austin instead of Oakland takes that future with them. Every pharmaceutical researcher who files their patent in Boston instead of San Diego. Every filmmaker who shoots in Toronto instead of Burbank. Every ag-tech startup that launches in Iowa instead of the Central Valley.

They don’t just take their current net worth.

They take every company they will ever build. Every person they will ever hire. Every tax dollar they will ever generate.

That loss never shows up in a Sacramento spreadsheet.

But it compounds. Forcing more taxes on those who stay.

The Polling

This election is being driven by information.

The more people understand what’s actually in this proposition, the faster support collapses.

Support hovers around 50% now. But it drops sharply once voters learn the details:

the permanent constitutional rewrite
the taxing of illiquid assets and IC
the mismatch of one-time revenue against an ongoing deficit.

Information is effective here.

The more people get educated.

The more that do not want this.

That’s the good news.

The bad news?

This proposition makes a great bumper sticker.

Make Billionaires Pay.

Simple. Emotional. Effective.

And there are very powerful, very well-funded people who want to change the state constitution to gain the legal right to tax what Californians own.

They’ve already raised millions gathering signatures. If this reaches the ballot, both sides are prepared to spend tens of millions making their case.

The pro-tax side has a slogan.

The anti-tax side has the facts.

Facts win.

But only if enough people hear them before November.

That’s why sharing this matters.

Here’s The Ask

This isn’t a left issue or a right issue.

It’s an us issue. About what kind of California we choose to be.

The legendary place (the most legendary place on earth) to build, create, and change the world. Or the first state to enshrine an asset seizure tax in its constitution.

With no easy off switch.

The proposition needs 874,641 signatures by June 24, 2026 to reach the November ballot.

Don’t sign it.

Tell your friends (especially the ones who think this only affects billionaires) what’s actually in it.

The constitutional rewrite.

The intangible assets.

The Prop 19 playbook.

The inevitable expansion downward.

And if it makes the ballot:

Vote no.

Not to protect billionaires.

They’ll be fine. They’re already in Miami.

Vote no to protect the constitutional wall between Sacramento and your financial life.

Vote no for the small business owner, the solo founder, the farmer, the creator capitalist who hasn’t built their thing yet.

Vote no for the California that is still possible.

🏴‍☠️

If you know someone who would benefit from this:

Data / research verified with Perplexity, Claude, ChatGPT, Grok, Google & Gemini…

…if you think there is a mistake. Let us know.

Sources: Stanford / Hoover Institution Study (March 2026) · California Governor’s Budget 2026-27 · NASBO California Budget Data · California Legislative Analyst’s Office · Pacific Research Institute · National Taxpayers Union Foundation · Tax Foundation · Baker Botts LLP · City Journal · Washington Post · Politico NY Albany Summit (March 11, 2026) · The Wrap / Hollywood job losses 2025 · CompaniesMarketCap.com (March 28-29, 2026) · California Board of Equalization (Prop 19) · Ballotpedia · SF Standard Billionaire Tracker · Mellman Group Poll (January 2026) · UC Berkeley IGS Poll (March 2026) · UC Berkeley / Politico Poll (February-March 2026)

Author’s projection note: The 100–150 billionaire departure estimate is analysis based on confirmed exits, reported attorney client disclosures, and economic incentive structures (not an independently sourced figure). Per-billionaire income tax figures are derived from Stanford/Hoover’s aggregate estimate of $3.3B–$5.8B paid annually by all 200 California billionaires. The $30B total annual tax loss figure is from Pacific Research Institute modeling.

All other data points are sourced above.

The rain in Spain stays mainly in the plane.

Call your parents.

Watch Spinal Tap.

All rights remain perturbed.

Copyright Bad Tuna Industries

🏴‍☠️