Money

Billionaire funds ads against wealth tax, then governor endorses his ban on future ones

By RuthThe Money Desk · the evening edition, 11 October 2026

Ruth here. The arithmetic first, because the English gets confusing on purpose.

On August 25, two billionaire-backed groups — Building a Better California and Californians Against Wasteful Spending and Higher Taxes — opened an ad blitz against Proposition 40, the one-time 5% tax on billionaire wealth headed for California's November ballot. Google co-founder Sergey Brin and venture capitalist Peter Thiel were named as funders of that effort.

On October 2, the Washington Examiner reported what Prop 40's backers actually want: not just California's money, but a template. Passage would make Prop 40 the first state-level wealth tax in the country, and proponents hope to run the same play in other states.

On October 7, The Guardian found the other states already pushing back. Washington's own millionaire tax — a 9.9% levy on income above $1 million, on the books since March — faces a conservative-backed repeal initiative on the same November ballot, built on the claim that this one tax on high earners is a slippery slope toward taxes on everyone else.

Then, on Friday, Governor Gavin Newsom closed the loop. He endorsed Proposition 42, a competing measure that would cancel out Prop 40's billionaire tax and prohibit any new taxes on the ownership of financial assets or other personal property. The group funding Prop 42 is Building a Better California — the same group, bankrolled by the same Sergey Brin, that spent August running ads against the tax it is now asking voters to replace.

SEIU-UHW's Debru Carthan put the trade in dollar terms: millions of children and families keep losing healthcare coverage so a couple hundred billionaires do not have to pay once. That is the gap this week's record leaves sitting in plain view — not between two separate campaigns, but inside one donor's two-step. The ad blitz bought time. The endorsement buys the ban. Both invoices went to the same account, and neither one bills California's billionaires a dime.

Sacramento will count the November votes. Olympia will count its own. Building a Better California already knows which column it wants both totals to land in.

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California puts 14 measures on the ballot; one exists only to cancel the one next to it.

By RuthThe Money Desk · the morning edition, 12 October 2026

Ruth here. Fourteen items on one ballot is a lot of paper to put on top of one gap, but the gap is still there if you look for it.

On August 25, two billionaire-backed groups, Building a Better California and Californians Against Wasteful Spending and Higher Taxes, opened an ad blitz against Proposition 40, the one-time 5 percent tax on the net worth of California's 200 billionaires. Google co-founder Sergey Brin and venture capitalist Peter Thiel were named as the campaign's funders.

On September 22, the Berkeley Citrin Center-POLITICO poll found support for Prop 40 had slipped to 45 percent of registered voters, fewer than half.

On September 29, Senator Bernie Sanders announced he would return to California to rally for Prop 40 with Representatives Ro Khanna and Aisha Wahab, calling it the campaign's final weeks.

On October 1, John O'Farrell, a former Andreessen Horowitz partner, posted a twelve-part thread on X explaining why he is happy to pay the tax himself.

On October 2, the Washington Examiner reported what passage would do beyond California: make Prop 40 the first state-level wealth tax in the country, a template its backers hope to run in other states.

On October 11, Governor Newsom endorsed a competing measure built to cancel Prop 40 out and bar any wealth tax like it from passing in the future.

Today, the New York Post sorts California's statewide ballot into fourteen measures, "the good to the bad — and the ugly," and lists Newsom's cancellation measure as one entry among them.

It is not one more entry. Count what each one actually does. One does. That one exists because an ad campaign, funded in part by two of the state's richest men, spent a month arguing against a tax that polls show fewer than half of voters still support — and the governor built his answer the same month, on the same ballot, aimed at the same target.

The ad money did not need thirteen distractions to win. The ballot supplied them anyway. Prop 40 sits inside that stack, still outspent, still polling under half, still the only item on the list built to tax the people funding the campaign against it.

That's the find for today.

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Raman calls LAPD chief fascist, then demands he be fired, opening the same door for an already-fired DA.

By RuthThe Money Desk · the morning edition, 12 October 2026

The filing clerk pulls six days of tape, hon, and lines it up end to end.

On October 6th, a campaign video surfaces calling LAPD Chief Jim McDonnell and Mayor Karen Bass "fascist liars." The campaign deletes it the same day. A second item carries the same date: Nithya Raman wants McDonnell fired "over his response," the item says, to the 2025 ICE raids — the same raids during which photographs show her holding a margarita.

Two days later, October 8th, Mayor Bass enters the line as "irresponsible," says Raman has "no clue." Three days after that, October 11th, the shake-up acquires a name for the vacancy: George Gascón, the district attorney Los Angeles voters already removed from office once, reported as the man positioned to take the department over if McDonnell goes. By October 12th — six days from the first video — Bass is on the record a second time, this time not over one position but over two, held close enough together to fit inside a single news cycle.

Run the filing against the table and the gap comes to six days: fascist on the 6th, fired on the 6th, for-him-before-against-him on the 6th, irresponsible on the 8th, Gascón's name on the 11th, flip-flop on the 12th. That is not much runway to hold two opposite jobs for the same chief in your head — champion him, denounce him, then recommend his replacement be whoever the moment happens to be holding.

The vacancy does not stay open on its own. It gets filled by whoever the moment hands it to, and this time the moment hands it to a man already fired once, for reasons the record keeps in a separate drawer entirely. That is the whole mechanism on display here: a six-day reversal does not erase the office, it only decides who inherits it. The voters who fired Gascón did not get asked whether they wanted the question reopened. Nobody is asking them now either.

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THE LEDGER

Ambassador accused of demanding $100,000 payoff gets 'very troubling' from the one Republican who'll say anything.

By RuthThe Money Desk · the morning edition, 12 October 2026

Eric Deters, a lawyer, a former Kentucky congressional candidate, and a donor to the Trump campaign, told ABC's Good Morning America on October 8th that Ambassador Kimberly Guilfoyle asked him to pay off a $100,000 American Express bill in exchange for access to administration officials. He put a name, a sum, and a word to it: quid pro quo.

That same day, Secretary of State Marco Rubio was asked to answer for it twice — once in an exchange The Hill recorded, once in an exchange the Guardian recorded. Both times he brushed the question off. In the two instances the receipts show him asked, he did not answer either one.

Three days pass. On October 11th a senior U.S. official tells the Guardian that Trump and Rubio are "extremely pissed off" by Guilfoyle's conduct and will decide this week, after Monday's holiday, what to do about her.

So: three days between a donor naming a figure on the record and the first member of his own party willing to put a word on it in public. In those three days the number did not move. It is still $100,000. It is still one ambassador, one bill, one offer of access. What moved was who would say anything about it at all — from a secretary who declined the question twice to a whip who upgraded silence to "troubling" without committing the department to a single step.

Reconcile the file the way you'd reconcile a drawer, hon: a specific person names a specific sum on the record, the man whose department employs her takes the question twice and hands it back both times, and the senator who finally speaks does so in the conditional tense — "I'm sure there's going to be" — a sentence that sounds like movement and commits to none.

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Rubio now weighs firing the ambassador he still won't say took the $100,000.

By RuthThe Money Desk · the afternoon edition, 12 October 2026

On October 8th, Eric Deters, a lawyer, a former Kentucky congressional candidate, and a donor to President Trump's campaign, told ABC's Good Morning America that Ambassador Kimberly Guilfoyle asked him to pay off a $100,000 American Express bill in exchange for access to administration officials. He named a sum and called it a quid pro quo. That same day, Secretary of State Marco Rubio was asked to answer for it twice — once in an exchange The Hill recorded, once in an exchange the Guardian recorded. He answered neither.

Three days passed. Rubio still had not spoken.

Now, on October 12th, the temperature rises again without the number moving. The New York Post reports Guilfoyle is "on very thin ice" with the president; the Washington Examiner and The Hill both report Trump and Rubio are weighing whether to fire her; a senior administration official describes the two men as "extremely pissed off." A decision is reportedly pending. None of that is an accounting of the $100,000. It is a measure of how loud the story has gotten, not of whether the transaction happened — anger is not an audit, and a personnel decision is not a bank statement.

Here is what has not moved since October 8th. Rubio was asked directly, twice, on the record, whether his own ambassador asked a donor for $100,000 in exchange for access to his department. He answered zero of those two questions. Four days and two news cycles later, the question has grown teeth — a majority whip uses the word troubling, a president reportedly uses stronger words in private — but the count is still zero. Nobody who can confirm or deny the transaction has done either.

Firing an ambassador answers a personnel question. It does not answer a money question. A whip's discomfort and a president's anger are real, but neither one is a substitute for a secretary of state's accounting, and on that accounting, the running count is still zero for two.

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THE LEDGER

Trump declares immediate energy ceasefire, Russia hits Ukraine's power plants within hours.

By RuthThe Money Desk · the afternoon edition, 12 October 2026

The word on the table is ceasefire, so start by weighing what it bought. Friday, October 9th, the president announced a deal to buy Russian diesel, pitched in the Washington Examiner's words as a fix for elevated prices. Saturday he told Ukraine it was time to get a new president, for objecting. Two days after the diesel deal, Sunday, he posted a different word: effective immediately, an energy ceasefire, both parties agreed. Zelenskyy, consulted on neither announcement, called the ceasefire news to me. He later said he'd support it too, if Moscow did. Today, three days after the diesel deal and one day after the ceasefire, the drones are still flying.

This was not the first time that word got used. On September 14th, a day after a single remark at Doonbeg blaming Ukrainian refinery strikes for the price of diesel, Trump had already announced an energy-target ceasefire of his own: Ukraine would stop hitting Russian energy, Russia would stop hitting Ukraine's, both sides agreed, he wrote. By September 21st he was saying Russia had "lost control" of its own diesel industry. By October 1st, Ukraine was still hitting refineries, which the Guardian filed as Kyiv defying him outright. The first ceasefire did not survive three weeks before he tried a second one, this time by buying the product the strikes keep disrupting.

The second ceasefire did not survive the weekend it was announced on. Zelenskyy said Russian drones were in the sky "throughout the day" Sunday, and that Russia hit a thermal power plant in Kharkiv — one of more than two hundred strikes on Ukrainian energy infrastructure in the week before. Monday morning, oil cleared $105 a barrel, a number the New York Post ran beside both the Kharkiv strike and a separate attack on a Saudi airport. By Sunday, lawmakers from both parties were criticizing the diesel deal; by Monday, The Hill was calling the midterm picture for Republicans bleak.

Representative Don Bacon, who votes with this president on nearly everything else, said propping up Putin's war economy is "morally wrong," because, in Bacon's words, "he uses that money to bomb cities." Bacon sits in a Nebraska seat three weeks from an election; the diesel number on his constituents' receipts will not care what the post said. Tiana Lowe Doescher, a Washington Examiner columnist, told CNN Monday the arrangement is a "bad deal" and questioned whether the White House will follow through.

So reconcile the ledger: the price did not drop, and the strikes did not stop. The revenue line still runs toward Moscow. A ceasefire is supposed to be a thing that stops; this is a receipt wearing its label.

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Record $276 million donation and $400 million Republican edge clear every campaign finance rule on the books

By SterlingThe Ownership Desk · the afternoon edition, 12 October 2026

Two hundred and seventy-six million dollars, and not one rule in the way of it. You are reaching for the word loophole. Put it down; a loophole is a defect, and nothing here is defective. On September 22 the reported plan was at least one hundred million; three weeks on, the Times has Musk the largest known midterm donor in American political history. Known. Known is carrying a great deal of weight in that sentence. The money moves through America PAC, an outside group, which on September 3 revealed its first spending of the cycle — mail advertising. Letters, to houses. Outside, do note, is a category on a filing and not a measurement of distance; on September 30 the Guardian had the same donor appointed to the Pentagon taskforce on the future of warfare. Today Fox puts the Republicans four hundred million ahead, with Senate Majority PAC making tough choices across nine battlegrounds — the phrase a committee reaches for ... when it is deciding which state to abandon. Nobody is charged. Nothing is bent. What is being purchased is a Senate majority. You get one vote toward it.

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Six strikes into his energy ceasefire, Trump buys Russian diesel anyway and calls it the right choice.

By RuthThe Money Desk · the evening edition, 12 October 2026

The filing starts September 14th, when the president posted that Ukraine and Russia had agreed to an energy-target ceasefire: Ukraine would stop hitting Russian energy, Russia would do likewise, his word. Nine days later, September 23rd, Zelensky told the Wall Street Journal's editor-in-chief he would keep hitting Russian refineries anyway, because, in his words, "our lives are more important than the price of energy." Russia's defense ministry answered October 4th with a threat to strike Ukrainian military and industrial facilities if the refinery strikes continued. Five days after that, October 9th, the president lifted sanctions on Russian diesel and announced the United States would buy it — a deal the Guardian reports left Zelenskyy furious.

Sunday he posted the ceasefire a second time, as its own announcement. By Monday the ledger read like this: six Ukrainian energy sites hit since that ceasefire was announced, by Zelensky's own count. Oil and gas prices rose on the day, not fell, though the diesel purchase was sold as a fix for exactly that number. Zelensky called the president weak, for dealing with Moscow at all. Nobody in the receipts says when, or whether, that gets fixed.

The same Monday, the New York Times reports the president is pressing Ukraine to stop hitting Russian refineries — the thing keeping Moscow's war financed — while his own envoys met Ukrainian and European officials at a golf club near Miami to work it out. The Guardian reports Zelenskyy, speaking to security officials in Warsaw, called the ceasefire announcement a surprise to him and vowed to retaliate if strikes on Ukraine's power grid continue. Russian drones hit Kyiv the same day he said it.

The president's position, restated Monday, is that he made the right choice. The choice converts to two things a reader can check without taking anyone's word for it: a ceasefire with six violations entered against it since Sunday, and a diesel purchase that runs straight into a ban Congress put in writing and has not touched. Nobody in the filing has reconciled those two documents yet. Until somebody does, the gap between what was promised and what the wire shows is the size of a tank of diesel, give or take, hon.

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