I have some tremendous news to share: we've just won a decisive victory against Mark Zuckerberg and the Silicon Valley billionaires. Together with my colleague Emmanuel Saez, we’ve spent years working alongside California's civil society to make the 200 Silicon Valley billionaires - including Mark Zuckerberg and Peter Thiel - pay their fair share. Today (26/06/2026), they have just lost a crucial battle.
It all began in July 2025, when Donald Trump signed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act into law.
The legislation included sweeping budget cuts, slashing funding for Medicaid, the health insurance program that serves low-income Americans.
To offset these devastating cuts, the SEIU-UHW union has spent the past six months gathering signatures to put a ballot initiative before California voters that would impose a one-time 5% tax on Silicon Valley billionaires.The tax on extreme wealth could raise nearly $100 billion.
Panicked, the billionaires did everything they could to stop it. Everything.
The initiative first needed to collect roughly one million signatures to qualify for the November ballot.
So what did the billionaires do over the past few months?
They poured enormous sums of money into preventing the union from gathering enough signatures.
They spent hundreds of millions of dollars and used every tool at their disposal. According to some reports, they even paid homeless people (!!) to sabotage the signature drive.
That tells you just how rattled they were.
But every one of their maneuvers failed miserably.
The billionaires didn't concede defeat, however, and fought until the very last minute to have the measure removed. The deadline was June 25.
They could count on California Governor Gavin Newsom, who worked behind the scenes to kill the initiative and shield the billionaires to the very end.
Despite enormous pressure, the union held firm.
It is now official and irreversible: Californians will vote on November 3 on whether to tax billionaires. The people will decide. This is a hugely important milestone.
Now comes four months of campaigning to convince Californians to vote in favor of taxing Mark Zuckerberg and the state's other billionaires.
A 5% tax on just 200 individuals could raise $100 billion to fund education and healthcare for millions of Californians.
Since 1982, the wealth of California's billionaires—the richest 0.0002% of the population—has increased thirtyfold.
It grew by 144% between 2023 and 2025 alone.
California's billionaires now hold $2.3 trillion in wealth - equivalent to roughly half of California's GDP and about 10% of U.S. GDP.That would be enough to offset the cuts imposed by the One Big Beautiful Bill Act.
According to a study we have just completed, California's billionaires pay only 0.07% of their wealth each year in California income tax - representing barely 0.2% of the state's total tax revenue.
Take Sergey Brin and Larry Page, Google's founders.
In 2019, 2020, and 2023, they reported no taxable income and paid no California income tax on the wealth generated by Alphabet.
Since 2019, their fortunes have increased by more than $400 billion.Sergey Brin is now spending tens of millions of dollars to defeat the billionaire tax initiative.
In the United States, extreme wealth has reached levels never seen before - not even during the Gilded Age of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when railroad, finance, and oil tycoons dominated the economy through monopolies.This is the concentration of wealth we must confront.
Because extreme wealth always brings with it extreme power: the power to crush competition, manipulate public debate, shape public policy, and buy elections.
Of course, billionaires will use that power to influence the November 3 ballot.
They are preparing to spend without limit while predicting every imaginable catastrophe should the 5% tax be adopted, backed by dubious studies and every kind of threat they can muster.
But democratic forces are more prepared than ever to take them on.
There is every reason to believe that the California ballot will be one of the defining political battles of the U.S. midterm elections.
If the measure passes, California's billionaire tax could quickly inspire similar initiatives in states such as New York, Washington, and Massachusetts.
In time, this process could very well lead to the creation of a federal tax on extreme wealth.
That's precisely what happened more than a century ago with the progressive income tax, which first emerged at the state level before being adopted by the federal government in 1913.
With a sufficiently large coalition of states - or, better yet, a federal tax - nothing would stand in the way of moving from a one-time levy to an annual tax on the largest fortunes, since wealthy Americans would not be able to escape taxation simply by moving to another state.
In 1978, California stood at the forefront of the anti-tax revolt by passing the famous Proposition 13, which capped property taxes and foreshadowed the conservative revolution that swept across the United States a few years later.
Nearly half a century later, history may be repeating itself - but in reverse.
California is now emerging as the front line in the fight for global tax justice. The November 3 vote could mark the beginning of a worldwide movement to end the tax impunity of the ultra-rich.
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