Billionaires finally have a voice

The Washington Post editorial board's case against California's wealth tax falls apart under scrutiny

(Photo by Andrew Harnik/Getty Images)

Over the last 14 months, Jeff Bezos, the centibillionaire owner of the Washington Post, has remade the historic newspaper’s editorial board into a guard dog for the ultra-rich.

Since Bezos announced last year that the paper’s opinions would prioritize “personal liberties and free markets,” the Post has published dozens of editorials lambasting proposed taxes on billionaires and millionaires, social welfare and public infrastructure programs, and attempts to regulate Big Tech firms — opinions that align neatly with the Amazon founder’s financial and political interests.

A recent example of this new tone came last week, when the Post’s editorial board wildly exaggerated the tax revenue California could lose from the Billionaire Tax Act (BTA), a voter referendum that will appear on the state’s November ballot.

The proposal, championed by the United Healthcare Workers West affiliate of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), seeks to raise $100 billion over five years by placing a one-time 5% tax on the assets of California’s nearly 200 billionaires. If passed, the vast majority of the revenue from the proposal would go toward covering the massive Medicaid cuts that Donald Trump approved last year to justify $1 trillion in tax breaks for the richest Americans. Those cuts are slated to cause over 1 million Medi-Cal enrollees to lose their coverage.

In its op-ed, the Post’s editorial board claimed the proposal had “already cost the state more in lost future revenue from income taxes than it would raise,” citing the recent reputed departures from California of several billionaires: Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Palantir cofounder Peter Thiel, and Google cofounders Larry Page and Sergey Brin.

However, a report from the Legislative Analyst’s Office, a nonpartisan state government advisory agency, produced a far different picture. According to that data, even if all 200 billionaires fled California, the loss in annual income tax revenue would be about $900 million. In other words, the $100 billion collected from the BTA would be a net positive for at least the next 100 years or so.

Since the billionaire tax proposal was first announced last year, only a handful of billionaires have actually left California. Among them were Page and Thiel, who moved to Florida, and Brin, who relocated to Nevada. Don Hankey, another billionaire, moved to Nevada around the same time, while former Uber CEO Travis Kalanick and venture capitalist David Sacks moved their permanent residences to Texas.

The BTA — if passed — would impose the 5% tax on all California billionaires who resided in the state at the beginning of 2026. The Post mentioned Zuckerberg in its list of billionaires who have left California, but the Facebook founder did not leave the state before the January 1 cutoff, meaning his assets would still be subject to levy.

The Post, meanwhile, omitted that some of California’s wealthiest have said that they won’t be joining the “exodus.” Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang, the eighth richest person in the world, said in January that he would be “perfectly fine” paying the proposed 5% tax on his wealth. And Brian Chesky, the chief executive of Airbnb, has said he plans to remain in California.

There is also an urgent human need for funding that abstract tax-revenue estimates fail to capture. Mikey Vaughn, a United Healthcare Workers West member working at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, said he is bracing for the closure of medical facilities across the state due to the looming Medi-Cal cuts that the BTA would seek to undo. “With the closures of rural clinics and hospitals and urgent cares… people are not going to be able to get to the place where they receive care within 30 minutes or less,” Vaughn said in an interview. “They’re going to have to go to the big metropolitan areas. So I’m expecting longer wait times. I’m expecting staff to get burned out more, because what we see at a hospital like mine, they really like to cut budgets and sometimes have lean staff.”

“Slaughter its golden goose”

Throughout its editorializing on the BTA and other proposed wealth taxes, the Post has repeatedly used the “golden goose” cliche to describe America’s richest, insisting that their largesse is responsible for propping up social welfare spending. In the editorial last week, the paper even accused the United Healthcare Workers West union of wanting “to slaughter its golden goose.”

The prospect of figures like Zuckerberg, Page, and Brin — all centibillionaires and three of the six richest people in the world — leaving California might seem like a threat to the state’s tax revenue. But the ultra-wealthy contribute very little to the tax base, because they rarely earn significant taxable income. Instead, their fortunes are tied up in equities, stocks, debt, real estate, art, and other assets. Research from Nuveen, an asset management company, found that billionaires contribute a mere 0.8% to the state’s personal income tax revenue annually.

The Post also cited research from California Tax Foundation visiting fellow Jared Walczak, who estimated that capital flight from billionaires could result in up to $19 billion in lost gross domestic product. That worst-case scenario sounds like a big number, but the Post failed to note that California’s GDP grew to $4.3 trillion last year.

Additionally, Emmanuel Saez, a University of California, Berkeley professor and lead author of the BTA, said that Walczak’s study was premised on a false estimate that Zuckerberg, Page, and Brin collectively paid $1.7 billion in state income taxes annually. “If only they paid so much!” Saez wrote. “In reality, using Securities and Exchange Commission data on stock sales, stock donations, dividends, and executive compensation, we can directly estimate that they paid only [$269 million] in California income tax in 2025, 6.3 times less than Walczak’s assumption.” (Zuckerberg, Page, and Brin are worth a combined $845 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.)

“The rich already pay more than their fair share”

Following Bezos’ announcement last year that the Washington Post’s opinion pages would begin “writing every day in support and defense of… personal liberties and free markets,” the paper’s editorial line has changed from broadly liberal to indistinguishable from the Wall Street Journal and the New York Post. Many of the Post’s editorials directly serve the interests of Bezos.

Earlier this month, the paper suggested that regular Americans should develop a sense of solidarity with billionaires. “If someone becomes a billionaire selling expensive shoes, it’s because people want and are willing to pay for them. That’s something to celebrate, not admonish,” the paper wrote in an editorial titled, “You can earn a billion dollars.”

In one of its frequent attacks on attempts to address inequality by raising taxes on the wealthy, the editorial board wrote last month that the U.S. does not need progressive taxation reform because the “rich already pay more than their fair share.” A national 5% wealth tax on billionaires would “strangle America’s golden goose,” the paper wrote in a March argument against a proposal from Sen. Bernie Sanders. And in February, the board insisted that there would be “little to gain by raising taxes on the rich.”

The paper has also lashed out incessantly at efforts to curb the artificial intelligence industry, writing that those who oppose building new data centers are “deranged” alarmists. AI “has the power to transform the economy, and therefore countless lives, for the better. The jurisdictions that embrace the future will win it,” the Post wrote in an April editorial urging Americans to welcome the construction of more data centers in their communities, despite the intense water and energy usage, noise pollution, and local and global heat increases caused by AI facilities.

As it happens, Amazon, which operates more than 900 data center facilities worldwide, has said it generates more than $15 billion in annualized revenue from its AI cloud computing services. Bezos is also raising a $100 billion AI fund, which he intends to use to take over and automate existing manufacturing companies.