If Sergey Brin’s $100 million donations this year hadn’t yet made it official, he has now: His political group is fighting the billionaire tax — and it has plenty of monied allies.
Building a Better California, the group the Google co-founder has propped up with $102 million to date this election cycle, disclosed almost $20 million from a handful of other Silicon Valley billionaires on Saturday, including venture capitalist John Doerr, cryptocurrency executive Chris Larsen and investor John Hering.
It also made its first $5 million donation to the committee formally fighting Proposition 40, the statewide Billionaire Tax Act put forth by Service Employees International Union-United Healthcare Workers West. The measure cleared the required threshold of 875,000 signatures and qualified for the November ballot in June, just weeks after the primary.
Brin’s 501(c)(4) group has already spent more than $50 million each on two competing measures, Props. 41 and 42.
The Saturday disclosures coincided with a fresh barrage of attacks on the measure by various Silicon Valley moguls and even the businessman TV personality Mark Cuban.
Over the weekend — and in response to arguments by Rep. Ro Khanna, one of the wealth tax’s most ardent congressional champions — Cuban described the measure as “the biggest fuck you in the history of entrepreneurship.” The measure would apply topeople with $1 billion or more in assets with a one-time, 5 percent tax.
Brin’s committee reported receiving — from Aug. 4 to 10 — $7.5 million from Doerr, $10 million from Ripple co-founder Larsen, almost $1 million from Hering and $250,000 from Neil Mehta, the Greenoaks Capital founder who bought up several blocks of the Fillmore as part of a private, and controversial, revitalization project.
In turn, the group spent $15 million between Aug. 4 and 14 on the wealth tax’s official opposing committee, and the two other competing, anti-tax ballot measure committees that would sink the billionaire tax. All three committees received $5 million each.
“The state is at an inflection point,” said a spokesperson for Better California. “The impact of Prop 40 is clear: it will create a permanent hole in the state budget. The nonpartisan Legislative Analyst reports a likely ongoing decrease of billions in state income tax revenue, and Stanford University economists estimate Prop 40 will end up costing the state nearly $25 billion. The result: there will be less money for schools, public safety, and healthcare—the problem Prop 40 purports to fix.”
Proponents for the measure decried Saturday’s latest windfall.
“A few controversial billionaires like Sergey Brin would rather spend millions to fund shady opposition campaigns than simply pay their fair share in taxes so millions of their fellow Californians don’t lose their healthcare,” said Debru Carthan, the executive vice president of SEIU-UHW. “That’s shameful.”
Advocates argue the tax would help backfill about $100 billion in cuts to federal healthcare funding and affect roughly 200 billionaires. Aside from Khanna, the measure has received the backing of Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and the Teamsters California union. The California Democratic Party also endorsed the measure after a contentious vote earlier this month.
The California Legislative Analyst’s Office, which analyzes legislation, wrote that the tax would likely add “tens of billions of dollars” to the California budget, but could result in ongoing tax losses of “hundreds of millions of dollars or more per year” if billionaires flee the state, as Brin purportedly has already.
Gov. Gavin Newsom, who is widely speculated to be running for president in 2028, opposes it. Advocates previously made a compromise proposal of a 2%, 2-year billionaire tax but Newsom reportedly rejected it. California’s Democratic gubernatorial candidate, Xavier Becerra, opposes the measure as well.
Khanna has faced intense backlash from Silicon Valley over his stance — namely through a failed attempt to primary him with a tech-backed challenger, Ethan Agarwal.
Khanna didn’t respond to a request for comment.
