Peter Thiel and Larry Page are preparing to flee California in case the state passes a billionaire wealth tax, report says
Tech billionaires are making plans to bail on California ahead a possible ballot measure that would tax their assets to help pay for healthcare.
Sources told the New York Times that venture capitalist Peter Thiel has explored spending more time outside California and opening an office for his Los Angeles-based personal investment firm, Thiel Capital, in another state.
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Ooo let's make it nationwide then
% of profits made in the state off standard pricing, tax the company. The company can choose to not sell their products in the state. If Google/Apple/whomever decides they don't want their products used in the state and lose 40m customers, that's their choice.
Go one further. If a company doesn't want to make it's product available in an area, that area has full access to all of its intellectual property and anyone can duplicate their work and profit off of it.
And while your at it have a mandatory hazard pay for employees that have to deal with customers to act like assholes. If acting like an ass to people doesn't have any penalties people will always feel like they are entitled to act like such, and slowly drive people to suicide. If the company has to pay the hazard pay, they'll actually figure out policies to ensure they treat others how they want to be treated, or it'll be cheaper to tell that customer to bugger off.
Acting like an ass shouldn't ever get you anywhere but asked to leave
Earthwide 😏
Hopefully their launch vehicles will be shot down, as an example to others.
“Leave” as in claiming their primary residence is in Florida while spending all of their time in California.
Puerto Rico does it right. In order to claim primary residence there you have to physically be there for something like 180 days of the year without any travel. States need to do that too.
180 uninterrupted days or 180 total? I think my state does 181 total
there's no method to track that for interstate travel...and we certainly don't need to give more data to the police state.
as with almost all the rest of the US's problems, the root cause is a half-assed federal system
I know Massachusetts has a law similar to this as well, though I don't remember the details. I think it's even something like you have to claim money that you make outside the state and taxes that you pay in other states so that the state can adjust your taxes accordingly. But there's definitely something about needing to live there for at least 6 months or something in order to claim primary residency.
California is pretty strict about taxing you if you spend too much time there.
I'm in Washington state (no state income tax) and have had colleagues who've spent a lot of time in California warned by payroll that they're approaching the limit on time before you're deemed a tax resident (maybe 180 days per year, but I'm not sure).
In particular, any part of a day spent in California counts as a whole day, as I understand it. So if you fly in on Monday evening, spend Tuesday and Wednesday, then fly back Thursday morning, it's 4 days.
In order for that to kick in, you need to be drawing salaried income, otherwise they have no means of tracking you. Salary is an insignificant component of most billionaires' income.
i doubt he wants to be associated with florida right now, considering what happened to his sidepiece last year, involving windows. thiel is a creature of habit, he hates anything news that unravel his behaviour.
What happened in Florida related to Thiel?
thiel had a model boyfriend(sidepiece) in florida, whom he showered with gifts and what not, when the bf became concerned about thiels ANTI-LGBT agenda with conservatives, he mysteriously "fell" out of an apartment building after he voiced his concerned to thiel about it hurting the gay community. it barely made any news, but its not surprising since thiel love to suppress any bad news about him.
what was his name? I'm having a hard time finding any info about this
jeff thomas, type in google you see some reddit discussion about him, it was pretty messy. apparently it was also result of third wheel situation as well
I think Tennessee is the new hotness for tax free residency.
They won’t leave. They’re just trying to scare idiots into voting for policies that only benefit the rich and their ilk.
Exactly they won’t move, this is like when people threaten to move if something happens, and when it does happens, nothing.
No, didn't you hear, everyone with more than $100 in savings fled New York now that Mamdani is the Supreme Leader there
they tried this with zohran in nyc, none left. RICH people wont live in red hellholes like kentucy, nebraska or alabama.
kentucky and nebraska and alabama are incredibly different from each other, if you've ever been to those places as a lefty
in fact, red ky and blue maine are more similar than ky and nebraska
From Maine and Nebraska and agree mostly. but you could certainly put the 3 in a venn diagram and come up with some interesting overlaps and contrasts. I find that Nebraska was dishing out way better educational outcomes than the other two, just anecdotally ;)
And yet, they all share the quality of "red hellhole".
Blue maine is doing just about as good as red kentucky, no? A bunch of poor, drug-addled white people barely scraping by. A good economy lifts up the poor, and the poor in both of those states, despite glaringly different politics, have a lot of the same outcomes. Honestly, the people of Kentucky are way more diverse and I'm happy for that. So many white people in Maine it isn't even funny as a non white person. Every person I know up in Maine has some family member that was in the Free Mason cult, which is like the cult for rural religious and affluent white people
I know a guy who's a Mason. I got him to talk when he was drunk. Sounds to me like it's a way for rich white people to make business connections and enrich themselves further, with a dose of silly mysticism on top. They're all Christians.
Yeah that cult :p I'm being a snarky ex-christian though. I still pray to... something, but it ain't white jesus that's for sure
Yeah I get it. I'm atheist, formerly militant atheist.
Median income in Maine is 14% higher than in Kentucky. Maine's the poorest state in New England, but that would land it somewhere in the middle of southern states.
Yeah, kentucky is a very poor state, its pretty sad but at least its just easy to blame on mitch, which isnt wrong. No idea whats going on up in Maine though. Someone should look into that. Im only getting familiar with the place because I got people up there and I love it, but man the parallels to kentucky are incredible despite me hoping it would be a lot... better since its consistently bluer than KY.
Median income may be higher but cost of living is too, probably making that increase negligible.
Yes typical poors like Warren Buffet would never live in Nebraska! Omaha is not the headquarters to many major businesses in the country. Red hellhole that split its vote for Obama, and has a fairly high ranked education system.... Nailed it dude.
https://wallethub.com/edu/e/states-with-the-best-schools/5335
It's also flat, the winters are brutal, there are way too many fundamentalists, and it cannot by any stretch be described as a sophisticated, cosmopolitan place. That said, it still beats the hell out of Peoria, Topeka, Wichita or a number of other Midwestern cities. None of which means I'd ever want to live there (and I've been there many times).
Yea im not in love with the place, but its a functioning city, it has good institutions and services, and its just really not fair to paint Nebraska like some bumblefuck when 90% of the state lives in a nice urban/suburban American city.
A.) No they're not
B.) If they do, then good for everyone in California. Let them dodge taxes elsewhere.
Right? These fucking billionaires act like they're existence is some kind of grace to everybody around them. As if they just exude money instead of continually extracting it from the economy making the lives of everyone around them worse.
If they weren’t paying taxes in the first place, their departure only improves the environment.
Taxes don't have to care where you live. If done properly, all that matters is where the assets are. You want to do more than $1B(or whatever number makes sense) of buisness in California? You need to create a California based subsidiary to handle it all. And share holders of that buisness pay tax on the value of those shares. Then it doesn't matter where Alphabet or Google or their CEOs are located.
'Flee'?! Like cockroaches when the light is turned on?
The ultra wealthy said the same thing about New York City, they aren't going anywhere.
Threatening people with a good time? A bold strategy Cotton!
If you can't contribute anything but only take take take, then get the fuck out of the whole country while you're at it. And stay out!
I fear you have fundamentally misunderstood Capitalism and all it stands for.
No I don't and that's why I hate it.
Please elaborate
This How Money Works video talks about these hollow threats. In short, they probably would leave anyway.
They're lying. They won't go. They're so rich that they don't have to worry about this kinda money. That's the whole point of being rich, after all.
You don't have to sell it to me I was already in
This happened in NJ and the billionaire who “left because of taxes” has both returned to the state since and pretty consistently stated he did not leave because of the tax hike and never said that was his motive. While I am sure these scumbags will do whatever is necessary to avoid paying taxes my point is don’t expect the media to not propagandize here.
The narrative being built is clearly one to make the average person think “increasing taxes on the wealthy will hurt us!” This is what happened in New Jersey. “If the tax increases are passed and David Tepper leaves it will cost the state hundreds of millions of dollars and ruin everything!”. It’s that domestic abuse shit; “you should just let me exploit the fuck out of you and if you don’t I’ll bail and it’s your fault for not letting me continue to do so”. Also fwiw while Tepper left NJ was fine and while his loss was notable to the tax budget it was not insurmountable by any means. NJ and California are already quite wealthy states.
If the billionaire class really had taxes as their top priority, or even near the top; they would have moved to Nigeria or something a long time ago. Instead, they stay in “commie-fornia” with high taxes … wonder why??? [because of so many reasons, from infrastructure to knowledge base…]
I'm threatening to move if my landlord persists on collecting rent, that should get him to back off
Your taxes don't mean shit to the state if all you do is look for reasons not to pay them, and don't pay them.
Sure, go to Texas. See how they like people moving from California.
And remember: Thiel is gay. So I hope he gets the maximum dose of homophobia and hostility from ignorant, prejudicial Texan chuds, too.
He's also
obsessed withthe AntiChrist, which is a somewhat controversial identity status amongst Evangelical and Baptist Christians.He's certainly the antithesis of Christ, along with Musk and Trump.
thiel himself is pretty homophobic as well, he thinks he protected if he is homophobic. Even to the point his model bf voice concerned, but died last year after "falling out a tall story apartment complex"
thiel dint want to be in FLORIDA, after his SIDEPIECE was defenestrated last year.
Isn't it a universal truth that the people who removed the most about "people moving from California" are the people who moved there from California 3 years ago?
Yet another benefit of the wealth tax.
Go. Please go. They say this all the time, I really wish they would.
Let them flee all the way to Russia. Billionaires shouldn't exist in the first place.
Keep those evil fuckers running!
We should hold a farewell party and hold them to it
how would one track these people down anyway, to give em a suprise party?
No they won't.
Excuse me. I resent that remark, I deleted Facebook and Reddit years ago. Haven't been outside yet though.
Good, making California a more affordable place for California families. I hope one their platinum-plated private jets collides with the others gold-plated mega yacht on their way out and I never have to read this shit from their publicists again.
go on, git!
Greedy fucks should be totally stripped of their wealth wherever they go so as to (re)learn what its like down here with us
If he leaves the country maybe he'll take his puppet Shady Vance with him.
There's plenty of southern states with insanely regressive tax schemes these fuckers could live in.
But you know they won't. Doesn't Peter Thiel notoriously enjoy the liberal young men of San Francisco?
Oh I'm not saying they will but they will before they leave the country lol
How about taxing billionaires in all 50 states, a federal billionaire tax and all other countries impose a billionaire tax. Make them have nowhere to go.
They'll love Guam!
Are these the same billionaires who were going to leave New York? Or different ones?
No, they aren't.
buh bye!
Bye bitch
we should just confiscate their ill-gotten gains, afterward they can move around wherever they'd like!
People of California: Don't threaten us with a good time. (Also, not like their tax dollars will be missed)
If they were going to leave it wouldn't be posted like this, as a threat in the news.
Lol they already have like 500 homes in like 50 countries. Its either this or a series of Luigi Mangioni-like shootings and imo, I'd rather have these billionaires just pay their fucking taxes.
Bet they don't.
It wasn’t as if these billionaire parasites were paying taxes anyways.
Financial obesity is an existential threat to any society that tolerates it, and needs to cease being celebrated, rewarded, and positioned as an aspirational goal.
Corporations are the only ‘persons’ which should be subjected to capital punishment, but billionaires should be euthanised through taxation.
they should pass a law that requires you to pay a 400m exit fee for filing a change of address if your name is peter thiel or larry page, per person, for each member of the extended family
BYE! I'd say "don't let the door hit you in the ass" but that's unlikely as you're all ass.
Let me guess he is moving to florida or texas
No they won't
They should flee earth. Start living on the moon and leave the rest of society.
Would it really be a great loss then?
Coke dealers and escort agencies are going to feel the pinch.
If you're rich beyond imagination, why nog pay taxes?
Because all they have left is hoarding wealth and the fear of losing some of it. They’ve become the movie or book trope of the withered miser who is completely consumed by greed and has nothing else. Unfortunately most of the real misers don’t get any comeuppance while the fictional ones do.
I think we've allowed the rich people dick measuring contest to go on for too long. All these guys care about is the imaginary number next to their name is higher than the other guys. Greed yes, but competition, game, sport, between psychos....also yes.
Liquidity issues.
For example, loads of elderly people in California own homes that have very low property taxes which were assessed decades ago. If their property values were re-assessed today they wouldn’t be able to afford the property tax and would have to sell their home and move (possibly flee the state).
Now that’s not the situation these billionaires are in. They aren’t tied up in a single house they’d have to sell. Their issue is that they’d have to sell a lot of stocks to pay a wealth tax, an event that could trigger a huge market drop in the price of those stocks.
You can be extremely asset-rich while being relatively cash-poor. I say relatively because these billionaires likely have millions in cash sitting around but that might not be enough to afford tens of millions in taxes every year (which must be paid in cash, not stocks).
I'm one of those people who's a bit asset-rich while not at all cash-rich. I'm not whining to anyone about it, that's the way I arranged things, and there were benefits to it as well as risks. I saw the tradeoffs and made my choices. I can always sell one of the properties if I need to, or take a bit more of a mortgage on it (my overall debt/equity is about 18%, so mortgaging is easy). But people with more are more able to pay, regardless of their asset-allocation choices. The whole "granny starving in a $3M house" story is a malicious crock of shit that only a fool would fall for.
And same with those billionaires. In fact, their asset allocation challenges don't mean a fucking thing to me. They're filthy rich due to a broken, crooked system. In a sane, healthy society there wouldn't be billionaires at all. So a correction is needed. They can take a haircut or they can face a much more extreme reckoning in the future. Up to them. And if they want to up sticks and move to Dallas, that's their choice too. They can go be parasites on a less aware host.
I’m not whining on their behalf, I’m warning that this approach to taxation will not hit the intended target. Billionaires whose assets are mostly concentrated in stocks have no reason to make California their primary residence. They can live anywhere in the world and if forced to they will do so.
If you want an effective tax on tech billionaires you should find a way to tax an asset they can’t move: intellectual property. That’s where all tech billionaires ultimately derive their wealth. I personally am against IP altogether, but I’ll take an IP tax as a consolation prize.
It goes without saying that land value tax is another tax on assets that can’t be moved. I also want to see LVT tried.
Billionaires can already live anywhere and they continue to live in their chosen country. They continue to live where they live because they enjoy living there.
Sure, and I’m glad you can derive satisfaction from the idea of chasing them out of California, but if that’s all you’re hoping for from tax laws then you’ve set the bar too low!
I’ve seen the “one person selling lots of stocks in an otherwise healthy company to raise cash tanks the market” claim repeated so many places as one of these “everyone knows this, it’s obvious” facts, and yet it never seems to play out that way to any meaningful degree. It’s one of the many Big Lies of capitalism that we’ve just been tricked into accepting.
You might occasionally see a minor one day dip of a few percent at worst, and even then they’re usually caused by some underlying issue unrelated to one person’s need for liquidity.
Yeah it’s one of the classics. In reality, the rich liquidate stocks all the time, particularly large amounts might not always be able to be dumped on the market immediately in one go but well, then it’s simply done over a certain timespan, but generally speaking it takes quite a lot before the market “cares”.
I think it's that a large pool of stocks going up for sale with no context seems suspicious. Stocks are inherently a gamble on the future price will be higher than current price, so by selling you're withdrawing your bet which could be interpreted as you knowing that the bet won't pay off and that other
gamblersowners paying attention might panic and try and sell too, which then could trigger a feedback loop. New buyers might see a bunch of people trying to sell and then think to themselves the bet isn't a good one and won't buy, making the current sellers reduce the price in the hopes of actually selling off and not left holding the bagA lot of "could" and "might* in that scenario, and it does play out from time to time (see NFTs, 2008 housing market). It also won't play out if the reason for the sale is known and isn't based on lost faith of the bet
Brilliant classic example of exception proving the rule. Both NFTs and the 2008 crash were caused by a massive lack of fundamentals, not irrational shareholder panic based on a few unknown selloffs, so the fact that those are the examples you came up with of big crashes just shows how weak the original claim was.
Apart from anything else, it doesn't even stand on its own terms - if billionaires were required to pay wealth tax bills, then there wouldn't be any mystery as to why they were selling their shares.
The taxes aren’t on one person though, they’re on everyone. Everyone looking to sell their stocks at tax time => price goes down because no one is looking to buy.
If their portfolios were properly diversified, you wouldn't see that effect on the overall market.
No. Obviously they wouldn't wait en masse until tax time to sell on the same day. If you knew everyone was going to sell their stock at the same time, wouldn't you sell yours first before the prices started plummeting? And by the same token, if you knew there was going to be a load of selloffs at the end of the tax year, wouldn't you wait to do all your buying at that time?
There's just way too many pressures in both directions for what you claim to be a plausible scenario.
And yet everyone waits until a few months before tax time to put their money into RRSPs. I have seen it first hand. The money just floods in.
It doesn’t have to happen on one day to move the price. Prices move whenever there are more buyers than sellers or vice versa.
This is so completely irrelevant and grasping at straws that I don't think you're even talking in good faith any more.
5% is a pretty high wealth tax, so I actually find this credible.
As rough as property tax can be, 5% would be crazy. Imagine being told you owe 25,000 dollars because Zillow shows houses near you selling for 500k...
I prefer the concept of stock secured loans counting as income.
I mean I'm middle class and could afford this... sure I wouldn't be happy about it but the idea that it would be so onerous on literal billionaires seems absurd.
the issue isnt being taxed...it's knowing with 100% certainty that your taxes are just going to pad the pockets of some rich fuck somewhere instead of back into the public good (like taxes are supposedly for), something that's true under both dems and republicans, dems just atleast put on a believable veneer
there's a dozen different ways to grab the $ back from these motherfuckers, the biggest issue there is the US's halfassed federal system gives em 50 different ways to weasle out and ratfuck safely from somewhere else.
Did you just swallow the hook and line, or the sinker too?
they should leave and go to Mars, where there's no tax
Good fuck em.
Well now I want to pass that wealth tax even harder. GTFO, Satan. I rebuke you!
Hey now. That's not necessary. Satan is actually pretty chill.
Fuck up some other state's politics for a change.
I'm sure the Californians are shaking in their boots at this.
No...
Please...
Come back...
🙄
Then don't allow them to leave the state
Or just take their companies within the state.
Fuck the rich
billionaires kill so many people, and destroy so much, and they get away with it. now they cry and run away when they get taxed a little bit
Thiel should be in prison and then deported back to Germany for violating Americans 4th amendment rights
no thank you, we don't want them here either.
I guess we will have to send him to the hauge for palantir’s participation in the genocide of the Palestinian people then
Bye, assholes.
Don't let the door hit you on the way out!
do we really care if the door hits them tho?
Because they currently contribute so much.
Actually Larry page may or may not be absolutely fine, I've never heard of him before.
Google co-founder, way up there in the billionaire list. Probably leaning towards the "not" be absolutely fine.
The Google founders are all very different people now. Getting mega rich fucks you up.
Boo. Hoo. Oh wait. Too many letters to spell out Google.
Bye Felicia
so it's a win win?
These tax scofflaws are Giga-Karens.
Good riddance ✌️ not that the cucks would ever actually leave