It thrills me to read that Peter Thiel and Larry Page may flee California if the state implements a one-time 5 percent wealth tax on billionaires. On fairness grounds, Thiel and Page have no case. If anything, the 2026 California Billionaire Tax Act is too easy on Golden State oligarchs, because 5 percent is a pretty small bite and because the proposal, devised by the Service Employees International Union and United Healthcare Workers West, exempts up to $10 million in retirement savings. (Rich jerks use Roth IRAs as tax shelters; Thiel sheltered $5 billion in his.)

The purpose of California’s proposed tax, on which the SEIU has only just started to collect signatures to get it onto the ballot this fall, is mostly to plug a $19 billion annual hole in federal Medicaid funding for California left by last year’s budget reconciliation bill. I’d be fine with California extracting that whole $19 billion from Thiel. (He’d still have $6 billion left.) Thiel didn’t donate to Trump in 2024, but he spent $1.5 million to elect Trump in 2016; last year, Thiel gave $852,200 to House Speaker Mike Johnson’s Grow the Majority PAC, which will boost Trump-compliant Republican candidates in this year’s midterms; and the budget bill is expected to invest so much cash in Palantir, the defense contractor of which Thiel is chairman, that Palantir’s stock price shot up 150 percent in 2025.

Reluctantly, though, I must agree with the California Governor Gavin Newsom, a leading contender for the Democrats’ 2028 presidential nomination, that the 2026 California Billionaire Tax Act is not a particularly good idea. This puts both Newsom and myself in distasteful company. In addition to Thiel and Page, Bill Ackman, who doesn’t live in California, opposes the proposed tax, and I expect other billionaire blowhards will line up against it in the........

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