From its Gold Rush days to its come-up as a behemoth of innovation and entertainment, California has bred wealth for nearly two centuries.
The state may soon ask its richest residents to return the favor and turn over 5% of their net worth to help backfill federal healthcare cuts. As the November election deciding the Billionaire Tax Act’s fate nears, the question of whether the tax would achieve its intended effect – or backfire – becomes ever more pertinent.
The proposed tax, which will appear on the Nov. 3 ballot as Prop. 40, has been hotly debated since it reached the California Attorney General’s Office last fall. Supporters say it’s a necessary measure to make up for President Donald Trump’s cuts to the state’s Medi-Cal program, which could amount to $30 billion a year. Detractors are wary that the measure would open the door to aggressive taxation and a billionaire exodus.
Tax advisers to California’s wealthiest residents and wealth scholars tracking billionaires’ moves offer the closest alternative to a crystal ball.
While seven of the Golden State’s 220-some billionaires publicly decamped ahead of the ballot measure’s retroactive snapshot date of Jan. 1, 2026, one international tax consultant said he believes many more have fled quietly.
David Lesperance, a managing partner at Lesperance & Associates, said he moved seven clients looking to avoid the proposed tax on their collective $1.3 trillion fortune. Lesperance said his billionaire clients whose aversion to paying the tax outweighed their desire to stay in California have made the relatively frictionless jump to low-tax states like Nevada and Florida.
“It’s absolutely logical that these people move, and they have the advisers of how to do it right, and they’ve got the teams to execute the move,” Lesperance said. “My clients didn’t have to put up a billboard as they were departing California to say, ‘I’ve left now.’”
Among those who didn’t or couldn’t keep their move a secret were five of Los Angeles’ billionaires: venture capitalist Peter Thiel, Uber Technologies Inc. co-founder Travis Kalanick, filmmaker Steven Spielberg, car loan magnate Don Hankey and In-N-Out chief executive Lynsi Snyder. Up in Silicon Valley, Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin cut ties with California late last year. All but Spielberg and Snyder cited the proposed tax as a primary driver of their relocation.
While most of the companies that the departed billionaires ran remain headquartered in California, that outflow could be “economically meaningful,” said Enrico Moretti, an economics professor at UC Berkeley. Moretti studies tax flight in response to estate taxes, the closest existing comparison to a wealth tax.
Findings from Moretti’s research into the geographic mobility of billionaires on the Forbes 400 list over two decades suggest that when a state starts taxing total wealth, it loses one in five of its billionaires. But the greatest impact, he said, would likely come from a wealth tax deterring up-and-coming innovators from settling in California.
“Losing a handful of billionaires per se will have overall not a huge effect on the local economy of Los Angeles or the state economy,” Moretti said. “But by making California less attractive to future founders and future entrepreneurs, the state will lose a lot of jobs and a lot of tax revenue.”
While a non-negligible, and perhaps underestimated, cohort of California’s wealthiest has skipped town, most members of the three-comma club seem to have stayed put, including some of the state’s biggest names in tech.
The loudest acceptance of the wealth tax has come from Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang, who has publicly stated that he is “perfectly fine” with the $8 billion tax bill he’d be asked to pay. Those keeping their Golden State digs more reluctantly, including former Google chief executive Eric Schmidt – now chief executive of Long Beach-based Relativity Space – and Stripe chief executive Patrick Collison, have put up a fight against the wealth tax. Through the Brin-seeded political action committee, Building a Better California, prominent tech executives have raised more than $200 million to oppose Prop. 40, campaign filings show.
The dozen or so billionaires whom private wealth attorney Laura Zwicker advises at Century City-based Greenberg Glusker have all, like Huang, resolved to remain in California and pay up.
“There are a lot of people who are very vocal about restructuring their lives to minimize their exposure to tax,” Zwicker said, “but what you don’t hear as much about is there’s a large group of clients who aren’t averse to paying tax and are averse to changing the way they and their family live in order to minimize tax exposure.”
Nevertheless, most of these clients have considered restructuring their wealth to lower their bill under the proposed tax, Zwicker said. Some have moved property owned by an intermediate holding company into their own names, she said, since Prop. 40’s net worth calculations would exclude real estate owned directly by the taxpayer or a revocable trust. Others have sold off certain assets, biting the bullet on capital gains tax.
While moves like these might raise personal liability or pose a hefty upfront cost, many clients have weighed decisions under the assumption that the “billionaire tax” wouldn’t be the last of its kind, Zwicker said.
“Most of the legal and tax community feel that it’s unlikely that this, if passed, would remain a one-time tax,” she said.
The Business Journal explored the area’s recent slate of billionaires who fled the state in the last year or more.
Peter Thiel
Peter Thiel, the venture capitalist who co-founded PayPal and Palantir Technologies, relocated to South Florida in late 2025 as California’s wealth tax debate heated up. The German-born magnate has since moved his family to Buenos Aires, Argentina, purportedly driven by political anxiety about the U.S. and the fear of a coming world war. His alignment with the libertarian sensibilities of Argentine President Javier Milei, who champions anarcho-capitalist economic reforms, might have also played a role.
While Thiel is one of a handful of elite investors who privately discussed shifting assets outside of California if the tax advanced, according to a New York Times report, the billionaire had been taking steps to leave the Golden State behind for several years. Thiel has maintained a personal residence in Miami since 2020, and his venture capital firm, Founders Fund, opened a Miami office the following year. He reportedly moved his voter registration to Florida in the spring of 2024. Last December, he announced that his private investment firm, Thiel Capital, had also opened a Miami office to complement the firm’s longstanding L.A. operations.
Thiel had been living in L.A. since 2018, when he left Silicon Valley. Despite his recent exit from the city and the state, Thiel quietly shelled out $130 million for a Bel Air mansion in July, The Wall Street Journal found. He reportedly sees the estate, sold at a foreclosure auction, as an investment property.
Travis Kalanick
Travis Kalanick, one of Uber’s co-founders, left L.A. for Houston, Texas, on Dec. 18. The businessman, who served as Uber’s chief executive from 2010 to 2017, implied that the wealth tax’s retroactive Jan. 1, 2026, residency snapshot date motivated the move in an interview with the Technology Business Programming Network podcast.
“Just to be clear, on Dec. 18, I moved to Texas,” Kalanick said. “I don’t know what’s so specific about Dec. 18, but let’s just say it’s prior to January.”
California’s proposed wealth tax would have had Kalanick pay roughly $180 million out of his estimated $3.6 billion fortune.
Following his exit from Uber, Kalanick launched ghost kitchen company City Storage Systems. The company has since rebranded as Atoms Inc., a robotics startup aiming to bring physical artificial intelligence into sectors like food service, logistics and transportation. The downtown-based venture emerged out of stealth this year and scored a $1.7 billion investment in July.
Steven Spielberg
Steven Spielberg, the filmmaker known for summer blockbuster classics like “E.T.,” “Jurassic Park” and “Jaws,” has swapped his Pacific Palisades estate for a co-op on New York City’s Upper West Side. One of Hollywood’s best-known directors, Spielberg became a New York City resident Jan. 1, the Los Angeles Times reported. His production company, Amblin Entertainment, opened a New York City office the same day. Spielberg’s spokesperson has said the move had no connection to California’s proposed wealth tax.
“Steven’s move to the East Coast is both long-planned and driven purely by his and (wife) Kate Capshaw’s desire to be closer to their New York-based children and grandchildren,” spokesperson Terry Press told the L.A. Times.
Spielberg has been somewhat bicoastal for decades, owning property on both the East and West coasts since at least the mid-1990s. He has now settled in the historic San Remo co-op on Central Park West, an exclusive building that many stars, including Bono, Mick Jagger and Tiger Woods, have called home.
Don Hankey
Don Hankey, who amassed a $33 billion fortune by pioneering and scaling subprime car loans, has decamped to Nevada. In January, a Forbes exclusive revealed the Hankey Group founder as the anonymous buyer of a $21 million penthouse just outside Las Vegas. The lifelong California resident told Forbes he began looking for property in Nevada last fall after hearing about the Golden State’s proposed wealth tax. He moved quickly into the furnished five-bedroom apartment from Malibu’s prominent beachfront “Xanadu” estate, which he and his wife, Debbie, paid $29 million for in January 2025.
While the Hankey Group remains headquartered in Hancock Park, one of its member companies, Western Funding, is based in Las Vegas. Hankey founded Westlake Financial, Western Funding’s parent company and the Hankey Group’s flagship subsidiary, in 1972 as an auto lender to borrowers with bad or nonexistent credit. The Hankey Group boasts $31.5 billion in assets and is projected to bring in $5.6 billion in revenue this year.
