Every billionaire is unique in his or her own special way — some shoot goats with laser guns and then serve said goats to their guests for dinner, others post their drug tests online — but for the most part, the phrase “does not like paying taxes” applies to the bulk of them. Which is why any time there’s talk of increasing taxes on billionaires in the places they reside, many of them make a big show of talking about how they’re going to move because this is tyranny, anti-business, an attack on a protected class, etc., etc. However, not a lot of them actually end up moving, because moving is a bitch even when you’re very rich, and a lot of them like where they live.
Some people are so morally opposed to new taxes on billionaires though, that they actually do pull up stakes and leave. In California, for example, a proposed onetime, 5 percent tax on the assets of the state’s billionaires caused at least three absurdly rich people to flee the state last year. Those billionaires are Google co-founder Sergey Brin (net worth: $279.2 billion), who now lives in Nevada; Uber co-founder Travis Kalanick ($3.6 billion), now living in Texas; and venture capitalist David Sacks (unclear, presumably at least $1 billion), also bunking in the Lone Star State as protest. The proposed tax that caused them to flee will be on the ballot in November and was introduced to make up for cuts to the state’s health-care funding that resulted from Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act; it is expected to raise approximately $100 billion over five years. But it won’t include revenue from Brin, Kalanick, and Sacks, who conveniently got out of California during the brief ten-week window between the proposal being introduced in October and the end of the year. Or will it?
