California Is Chasing Wealth That Has Feet
24th September 2026
Last week California certified a Billionaire Wealth Tax for the November ballot: a 5 percent one-time levy on the state’s billionaires, paid out over five years, to raise about $20 billion a year for health care, food aid, and schools after federal cuts. We understand the impulse. The state has a revenue hole, and billionaires can afford to help fill it.
But the tax will fail at the thing it’s for, and it will fail for a simple reason: billionaires, unlike land, have feet.
We just spent months building the empirical case, calculating the aggregate of California’s land values, in a new report from the Center for Land Economics. The short version: land is one of the biggest pools of wealth there is, California has more of it than almost anything else, and it cannot leave the state.
…
The wealth tax’s own math assumes a $2 trillion base, which is a nearly 2x overestimate due to wealth flight.
Six California billionaires — Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Peter Thiel, Don Hankey, Travis Kalanick, and Steven Spielberg, worth roughly $540 billion combined — had already moved their tax residency out of state before the measure’s January 1, 2026 cutoff. Mark Zuckerberg (about $220 billion) followed in early 2026 and will almost certainly fight the retroactive reach in court. Add a roughly $200 billion overestimate that other economists have flagged in the proposal’s own model, and nearly half the assumed base is gone.