SAN FRANCISCO — Billionaire opponents of California’s proposed wealth tax have spent more fighting it than they ever have on a political cause in the state, according to a POLITICO analysis. A record $612 million from more than 70 current and former California billionaires is flooding this year’s state elections, nearly half of it for groups working to defeat Proposition 40, the wealth tax initiative on Tuesday’s ballot, POLITICO found. The fight over Prop 40 has brought California’s wealthiest residents — many from its native tech industry — together in an unprecedented show of political coordination, the new data reveals.
Tech leaders say the wealth tax has accelerated plans for broader political engagement this cycle, building networks that could be the foundation for future campaigns. It’s a particularly striking display of unity from Silicon Valley’s notoriously hard-to-organize donor class. Google co-founder Sergey Brin is by far the well-funded opposition’s biggest benefactor, with former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, venture capitalist John Doerr, Stripe CEO Patrick Collison and crypto executive Chris Larsen also among those who have contributed the most dollars in trying to stop the billionaire tax.
The possibility of a tax on their assets has drawn more than $293 million from at least 30 California billionaires, the majority of whom made their fortunes in tech but otherwise span industries, from agriculture to real estate — as well as the political spectrum, from established Democratic megadonors to some Republican allies and first-time donors. Frank Slootman, the billionaire board chair and former CEO of cloud data company Snowflake, said he only had a “moderate” interest in politics despite giving $5 million to an anti-Prop 40 group, arguing that the measure erodes private property rights and the state’s economic dynamism. This is not about politics for me — it is far more important than that.” The other half of billionaires’ spending this year came largely from Tom Steyer, a rare billionaire endorser of Prop 40 who bankrolled his own failed gubernatorial bid — the most expensive primary campaign in state history.
Even longtime strategists who have worked for statewide candidates and California’s costly ballot battles struggled to find a historical parallel for the coordination or scale of billionaire spending against Prop 40. Rob Stutzman, a Sacramento political consultant whose past campaigns have involved a billionaire gubernatorial candidate and record-breaking ballot spending over sports betting, said that Silicon Valley leaders see Prop 40 as an “existential threat to tech in California” and the innovation that has taken root in the region for decades. There is nothing that focuses similar-situated people.” Proponents of Prop 40 contend the measure is necessary to backfill federal health care cuts.
The last year billionaires in California came closest to spending at this level was 2010, when they dropped $147 million on state races and measures, according to POLITICO’s analysis — a total that’s just over half of what the current wealth tax proposal mobilized. Most of it was the result of billionaire Meg Whitman, a former CEO of eBay and Hewlett-Packard, self-funding her unsuccessful Republican campaign for governor. Scott Ellis, a millionaire and Prop 40 supporter who formerly served as a senior director at HP, described the magnitude of billionaire spending to fend off the measure as “a completely different animal” than past examples of “a lot of money spent by a rich person to get themselves elected.” “People with wealth and extreme wealth are getting much more brazen than they used to be,” Ellis told POLITICO.
They have an incredible range of choices to make, including choosing to oppose this kind of ballot measure.” Representatives for several billionaire opponents of Prop 40, including Schmidt, Larsen and agricultural titan Stewart Resnick, declined to comment on POLITICO’s findings. Others, like Doerr, referred POLITICO to Building a Better California, a new Brin-led political operation that has become the primary vehicle for billionaire money against Prop 40. The group defended the importance of its cause, arguing the measure would “permanently devastate” the state tax base and budget while undermining the health care funding it’s intended to patch.
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