Google Co-Founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page Have Become So Wealthy That When They Move Out of California to Dodge the Billionaire Tax, the Golden State Will Lose a Whopping $20 Billion to Spend on Healthcare and K-14 Education.
15th January 2026
California has always sold itself as more than a place. It is a promise. The weather helps, the coastline flatters, and the mythology does the rest. Come here, build something improbable, become unimaginably rich, and you are not merely rewarded with money. You are crowned. For decades, Silicon Valley’s greatest fortunes were treated as proof that California’s gravitational pull was permanent, that the state could mint billionaires and keep them in orbit through prestige, proximity, and a sense that leaving would be culturally unthinkable.
That story is now unfolding with a quieter ending than anyone expected, written not in moving trucks and farewell speeches, but in trusts, addresses, and entities that change jurisdictions with the ease of a signature.
Larry Page and Sergey Brin called California home from around 1995 onward, long before Google became a verb and long before the Bay Area turned into the modern cathedral of tech wealth. They arrived as students, built Google in the late 1990s, and spent nearly thirty years as the cleanest embodiment of the state’s dream. California did not simply host their success. It framed it, legitimized it, and amplified it into a cultural export. If you had to name two men who should be untouchable by the politics of exit, it would be these two.
There’s a classic fable about killing the golden goose that probably applies here.
Supporters argue the state is staring at the loss of about $100 billion in federal healthcare funding over the next five years, a drop that could hollow out services, close facilities, and erase as many as 145,000 healthcare jobs. Their pitch is moral and urgent. Make the richest pay once, so the system does not break.
Whose fault is it that the system was built to depend on a source of funding that might go away? Well, they didn’t think it could go away. Politicians live in the present. If you’ve got money, you’ll always have money, so go ahead and spend it. “There are still checks in my check book, so my checking account can’t be out of money!”
The California 2026 Billionaire Tax Act is a measure designed to feel politically elegant. A concentrated tax burden on a tiny number of people, paired with a public benefit that touches almost everyone. In theory, it could raise something like $100 billion over five years, with 90% earmarked for healthcare and 10% for K-14 education and food assistance, as pointed out by Baker Botts. The message is clean. If California is about to have billions less to spend on healthcare and education, then billionaires should help absorb the shock.
Note the Aggregation Fallacy. “If California is about to have billions less…” Uh, no. It’s the California government that is about to have less, not California. And when politicians don’t have as much to spend as they think they ought (and especially when they don’t have enough to give the people who voted for them Free Stuff), they look for a deep pocket to steal from. The problem is that pockets are mobile, and deep pockets are more mobile than most.
But what makes California powerful is also what makes it fragile. The state’s finances are unusually dependent on the ultra-rich. Personal income tax accounts for about 62% of the General Fund, and the top 1% of earners typically contribute around 40 to 45 percent of those receipts. This is a structure that prints cash in boom years and becomes brutally volatile when markets soften or when the most valuable taxpayers decide their best move is to stop being taxpayers here.
The only thing to wonder about is that it took them so long to figure that out. Politicians in California are overwhelmingly Democrat. The people who elected them are all Democrat. They ought to know what Democrats are like, and what they do when they don’t have enough money to pass out the Free Stuff for which they were elected.