Money

Man spending $100 million to kill a 5% tax dines beside the president whose cuts it offsets

By RuthThe Money Desk · the afternoon edition, 19 October 2026

Proposition 40 asks California voters, on November 3, to impose a one-time, 5 percent tax on billionaire residents, the proceeds earmarked to offset federal Medicaid cuts the president signed into law last year. In August, two campaign groups formed to defeat it before voters even saw it on a ballot: Building a Better California and Californians Against Wasteful Spending and Higher Taxes, financed in part by Google co-founder Sergey Brin and venture capitalist Peter Thiel. By September 21, six Nobel Prize-winning economists, including Joseph Stiglitz, signed an open letter endorsing the measure that ad money was built to kill. On October 1, a former venture capitalist told reporters he would be glad to pay it — he knew where he wanted to live, he said — the same day Governor Gavin Newsom signed laws barring employers from using artificial intelligence to track workers' biometric data and emotional states, and requiring written notice when AI triggers mass layoffs. Ten days later, on October 11, Newsom endorsed a second measure for the same ballot, built to cancel Proposition 40 and bar any future wealth tax in the state. The AI protections and the tax cancellation came from the same governor, in the same month, aimed at two different kinds of California fortune.

This weekend the ledger closed its own loop. Sergey Brin, who by Sunday had spent more than $100 million fighting the one-time tax, was seated at the left hand of Donald Trump, who is himself a billionaire, at a fundraising dinner for the pro-Trump super PAC MAGA Inc., at Mar-a-Lago. OpenAI president Greg Brockman sat at Trump's right. The invitation came from the PAC, not from either man; nothing in the record shows either of them organizing the evening. What the record does show is simpler: the $100 million spent to stop a 5 percent tax on billionaires sat beside the president whose Medicaid cuts that tax was written to offset, at a dinner his own political operation hosted.

Call it what the ledger says, hon. Proposition 40 would reach a resident like Brin once, at 5 percent. Newsom's measure would make sure it never reaches him, or anyone like him, again. The economists who studied the gap signed their names to it. The venture capitalist who could afford to pay said he didn't mind. The man actually billed for it spent nine figures instead, then had dinner with the president. Representative Khanna called the vote a choice between "New Deal Democrats" and "corporate Democrats." On November 3, fifteen days from today, Californians get to make that choice — assuming the measure built to cancel it doesn't get there first.

This story on its own page →

Netanyahu predicts cheaper gas once the war ends, the war that already made Trump $4.4 million.

By RuthThe Money Desk · the afternoon edition, 19 October 2026

That endorsement carried no price at the pump.

This week Netanyahu came to the White House and supplied the number the endorsement left out. He called the president the greatest friend of Israel, and he predicted gas prices will fall once the threat from Iran's government is eliminated. The forecast gives the war's price at the pump a direction: high now, because the threat is still live, and lower only once the threat is gone.

Pull the drawer from six weeks back, dated September 9th. An analysis of the president's own annual financial disclosure found that his nine largest fossil fuel holdings had risen in value by as much as $4.4 million since the Iran war began, a war that by that count had then run more than six months.

Set the two beside each other. Netanyahu's forecast and the disclosure's total describe the same war and the same stretch of time, and they point in opposite directions. The forecast says the price comes down once the war ends. The disclosure says that for as long as the war has run, its higher price has already moved as much as $4.4 million into holdings carrying the president's own name.

A forecast is free to make; nobody checks it until the date it names arrives. A financial disclosure is not free in that way. It is filed, it is dated, and it is the one place the public gets to see what a president's fossil fuel holdings are actually doing while he talks about the price everyone else pays.

Line the two up and the gap is not a rounding error. It is the distance between what an ally says will happen to the price and what the filing already says has happened to the money, while the public waits on the part that hasn't happened yet.

Whoever's column that $4.4 million sits in, hon, it is not the column the gas pump keeps open for the rest of the country. The forecast gets a date nine days out. The disclosure already has its number, filed six weeks ago, while the price it's attached to is still high.

This story on its own page →

Musk to give every American child SpaceX stock; parental consent optional under the Trump Accounts program

By SterlingThe Ownership Desk · the afternoon edition, 19 October 2026

Every child in America is to receive a share of SpaceX, and you are thinking: how handsome. Look at the delivery. A gift is a thing one may decline — decline, mind you — and the Examiner reports this one goes into Trump Accounts even where the parents object. Not a gift, then. An enrollment. Every donee a minor, and no donee asked.

He wrote on Monday that it "will be the first of many."

Price the month. On October 12 the Post put his midterm spending at $276 million, the largest of the cycle. On October 9 his plan for SpaceX to become a mobile carrier wiped more than $50 billion off AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile before lunch. On September 22 a disclosure showed Trump bought up to $50,000 of SpaceX in July and sold up to $15,000.

The child holds one share ... and the man who sent it holds billions.

This story on its own page →

Poll finds 5% tax on 200 billionaires tied; $100 million campaign calls it collapsing

By RuthThe Money Desk · the evening edition, 19 October 2026

Proposition 40 asks California voters, on November 3, for a one-time 5 percent tax on the state's roughly 200 billionaires, the proceeds earmarked to offset federal Medicaid cuts signed into law last year. In August, two campaign committees formed to defeat it before most voters had heard of it — Building a Better California and Californians Against Wasteful Spending and Higher Taxes — financed in part by Google co-founder Sergey Brin and venture capitalist Peter Thiel. On October 1, a former Andreessen Horowitz partner, John O'Farrell, told his followers in a twelve-post thread that he was glad to pay the tax and had no plans to leave the state that would collect it. On October 11, Governor Newsom endorsed a competing ballot measure that would cancel the wealth tax outright and bar any future one — a move SEIU-UHW's Debru Carthan called Newsom "showing California his true colors." Within the week, Brin was photographed at Mar-a-Lago beside the president whose tax cuts Proposition 40 is written to offset.

This week the ledger took two new entries. The Post's headline calls that a "spectacular collapse." The filing says otherwise: a tied race that was already tied in September, reported this week as a collapse by a paper whose readers are also the voters the Brin-Thiel committees are spending $100 million to persuade.

Stanford economists, in a study CBS News covered the same day, caution that a billionaire tax could backfire. The CBS report attaches no dollar figure to the warning, names no mechanism by which the backfire occurs, and gives no account of whom it would fall on. It also does not name the economists, cite the paper, or say where it was published. What it offers is a university's name and the word "could."

Reconcile the two filings against each other, hon. A poll that moved one point in five weeks is being sold as a landslide reversal. A caution with no number, no mechanism, and no named author is being sold as a warning from Stanford. Both filings surfaced the same week a man who has spent $100 million fighting this tax dined with the president whose cuts it would offset, and the same month the governor whose party depends on that man's money endorsed a measure to cancel the tax for good. The gap between what the filings say and what the headlines claim they say is not an accounting error. It is where the $100 million went.

This story on its own page →

Saudi government flew bugging suspect's family home, then offered to cover his bail.

By MitchInvestigations · the evening edition, 19 October 2026

The filing arrives this weekend as a court memorandum, and like most federal filings it reads best out loud, in order. All together now — paragraph one: the defendant is an OpenAI engineer named Abdulrahman Alfozan, employed since last July, roughly three months before his arrest, charged with installing a recording device in a company conference room.

Back up to October 1st. The Wall Street Journal reports that Thursday that OpenAI has terminated three safety researchers for sharing what the company calls "confidential company information." The company does not say what the information was. Twelve days later, on October 13th, the Department of Justice announces Alfozan's arrest. He had been on the job three months.

The FBI confirms the arrest the next day, October 14th. Routine enough — an employee, a hidden microphone, a federal charge. Then the document keeps going.

All together now — the next clause: Saudi officials paid for Alfozan's wife and son to fly out of the United States. The filing does not say when the flights were booked relative to the arrest, only that Saudi officials paid for them. The clause after that: Saudi officials offered to cover his bail. The clause after that: Alfozan was in close contact with a member of the Saudi royal family. The clause after that: he was planning to move to Riyadh when the FBI arrested him first.

Not released on the bail a foreign government had offered to pay. Held.

Here is what the document does not contain: a reason. It does not say why a government would move a suspect's family out of the country while he remains in federal custody, or why it would offer to post bond for a man charged with planting a bug in the offices of the company that makes ChatGPT. It does not have to. Prosecutors filed it to establish what Alfozan was doing and who was paying for it. The rest is left to the reader, the same way it is left to the judge, who read the same four clauses and decided three months on the job and one plane ticket home were enough to keep a man in custody.

The document speaks for itself. That is what a court filing is for.

This story on its own page →

California governor fighting a billionaire tax praises a billionaire who owes New York $59 million in back taxes

By RuthThe Money Desk · the morning edition, 20 October 2026

In August, two campaign committees opened against Proposition 40, California's one-time five percent tax on the state's roughly 200 billionaires. Building a Better California and Californians Against Wasteful Spending and Higher Taxes carried financing from Google co-founder Sergey Brin and venture capitalist Peter Thiel.

On October 1, a former Andreessen Horowitz partner, John O'Farrell, filed the opposite answer in public. In a twelve-post thread he told his followers he was glad to pay the tax and had no plans to leave the state that would collect it.

On October 11, Governor Newsom filed his own. He endorsed Proposition 42, which cancels Proposition 40 outright and bars any future tax on financial assets, retroactive or otherwise. The Hill ran the same endorsement again two days later, which tells you how hard the campaign wanted it read.

On Tuesday, Stanford economists filed a caution of their own: the tax, they wrote, could backfire.

Reconcile that filing against the table. The backfire a one-time five percent tax might produce is capital flight — a resident leaving the jurisdiction that wants to tax him. On Tuesday, the New York Post filed a different resident. It identified him by his bill: $59 million owed to the state of New York, unpaid, on the books. His address since is a $4.9 million compound in California — the jurisdiction currently fighting not to tax wealth like his. The Post's own words for him were "a convicted Wall Street fraudster"; we didn't write them and don't need to. Newsom has praised him.

That is the whole gap, hon. The tax he is fighting would have taxed precisely this. The treasury he is not helping collect from is New York's.

Fourteen days remain before California voters settle which column this lands in: the tax that would have reached him, or the measure that guarantees it never will.

This story on its own page →

THE INTERNAL MEMO

Executive wrote the harm was "severe enough" to fix; TikTok fixed it for $100 million in Alabama.

By RuthThe Money Desk · the morning edition, 20 October 2026

An executive at TikTok, writing in texts that surfaced in a trove of unreported court records made public this week, put it this way: "I have been fighting about fixing this for months with people who didn't think the harms are severe enough."

The problem did not stay internal. The number attached to it was $100 million minimum, plus a list of safety features TikTok agreed to build. Twenty-four days later, the NPR story landed, and with it the texts that explain why Alabama needed a lawsuit to get safety features a company's own staff had already asked for internally, for months, before anyone sued.

So reconcile the ledger. The fix TikTok would not make on an employee's word, it made on a judge's docket, for $100 million minimum. That is not a regulatory cost; it is what it costs to be the company that got caught instead of the company that acted. The fix applies in Alabama, under that one settlement. The alarm, on the executive's own account, was not about Alabama; it was about the harms themselves, severe enough to need fixing regardless of who was suing.

Where does money move when it isn't buying child-safety features? On October 7th, an analysis counted 172 billionaire families' spending in the 2026 midterms: more than $1.7 billion, the most ever recorded for a midterm cycle, most of it routed through the super PACs Citizens United made legal. Thirteen days later, the TikTok filing ran. No receipt here ties the two ledgers to each other; the comparison is just the two numbers, dated and side by side: one company's price for getting caught, one election's price of admission.

That is the whole audit: the price of being asked nicely is zero. The price of being sued is $100 million. And the price of a midterm, this year, is $1.7 billion, paid in full, on time, no settlement required.

This story on its own page →

CBO prices war at $38 billion, calls it conservative; farmers get $8 billion relief for its fuel costs.

By RuthThe Money Desk · the morning edition, 20 October 2026

On September 15th, the Congressional Budget Office closed its books on the war with Iran and priced it at $38 billion. The office called the number conservative. In accounting, conservative means the number has room above it and none below.

Thirteen days later, on September 28th, the Oval Office opened on a different ledger. The president announced a $15 billion steel plant for Iowa, the largest in the nation's history. Two days after that, on September 30th, South Korea pledged up to $200 billion for American energy: an Alaska gas pipeline, a Texas power plant, eight new nuclear power plants. Two announcements, $215 billion, inside of 48 hours.

Seven days after the South Korea pledge, on October 7th, the Guardian went back to Iowa to check the foundation. Zero is how much of it has broken ground.

On Monday night, the ledger came back to the war's side of the page. In Kansas, stumping for Senator Roger Marshall, the president announced the Harvest Fuel Relief Program: $8 billion in aid for farmers hurt by record diesel prices, the same diesel the war helped set the price of. The Agriculture Department will run the payments.

Here is the reconciliation, hon. The war cost $38 billion, by the government's own conservative count. The extra energy costs charged to households during that war already run to $121 billion. Against that bill, the relief check covers about six point six cents on the dollar. The other $215 billion promised this fall for American jobs has a groundbreaking date of never-yet. The $8 billion has a disbursement date of now. One column of this ledger gets announcements. The other gets invoices. The farmer in Kansas is being handed the invoice column and told it's a check.

This story on its own page →