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

As it ran on the front

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.…