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One‑Time Billionaire Tax Is Just First Step

My take on California’s “One-Time” Billionaire Tax. It’s much worse than it looks. 📉 Will it pass? Yes, likely. It only needs 50%+1 voter approval. SEIU + CTA have done this before—Prop 55 won 63% in 2016. ⚖️ Will it get tied up in litigation? Almost certainly. Retroactive wealth tax on a tax type CA has never had = due process challenges. Billionaires have the legal budgets for years of fights. 👋 But it’s clearly … only the start. The goal is an annual tax, not one-time. And the target is $25m-50m net worth folks, including illiquid foldings (early stage founders raising a Series B). The “one-time” framing is strategic, not terminal. The same coalition (CTA, CFT, SEIU) already has AB 259 written—an >annual$50M threshold<, with plans to go to $25M. It’s been introduced 3 years running. The one-time tax removes the constitutional barrier. Once that’s gone, the annual version becomes a much easier ballot measure. 🔃 CA Policy Center said: “If SEIU hopes to keep Medi-Cal spending growing, it may need to place repeated wealth taxes on the ballot—potentially lowering the threshold as billionaires flee.” The real risk for founders: At $1B, you’re taxing ~200 people. At $50M, you’re taxing 23,000 households—including most successful founders on paper before any liquidity event. The rational move isn’t to leave when you hit the threshold. It’s to leave—or never incorporate in CA—before you get anywhere close. ✈️ Net net: it will make sense to leave before the Series B. Vinod Khosla nailed it: “Even people who don’t expect this initiative to pass are still planning to leave because there will be another one.” The one-time tax is the constitutional Trojan horse. The annual tax — at a much lower threshold — is already waiting inside.