California Gov. Gavin Newsom ramped up his opposition to a proposed tax on the state's billionaire residents on Friday by endorsing a competing ballot measure that would both cancel out the billionaire wealth tax initiative and prohibit any new taxes on the ownership of financial assets or other personal property. "He’s showing…
Page F122From§Eachthe evening edition — 19 October 2026
Poll finds 5% tax on 200 billionaires tied; $100 million campaign calls it collapsing
As it ran on the front
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.…
…(cont) 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.
“They don't need the poll to be real, they just need you to read the headline and stop reading. Forty-five to forty-six is a rounding error dressed up as a landslide, and the same week some egghead study with no number in it gets wheeled out to say the quiet part with a Stanford return address. A hundred million dollars doesn't buy you facts, it buys you the headline before anybody checks the math.”
“The study is from Stanford — that's not some partisan outfit, that's serious economics, and serious economists are raising a caution flag. Growth effects, capital flight, you don't just wave that away. Though I'll grant, if you'd asked me for the number on the flight risk, or the paper itself, I — did I just say I didn't have the number? That's not usually how I open.”
Earlier in this story
- Man spending $100 million to kill a 5% tax dines beside the president whose cuts it offsets By Ruth · the afternoon edition, 19 October 2026
- Newsom endorses the measure that cancels the billionaire tax he let California's voters decide on his own By Ruth · the morning edition, 18 October 2026
- Newsom pitches a federal stock-trading ban, then endorses the measure canceling his state's billionaire tax. By Ruth · the afternoon edition, 17 October 2026
The receipts
California voters remain closely divided over Proposition 40, a proposed wealth tax on billionaires, with 46% of likely voters supporting it and 43% opposed.
A new analysis from Stanford economists cautions that enacting a billionaire tax could have unintended consequences.
· Fewer than half of California voters back billionaire tax: Poll from the morgue, 22 Sep 2026
· Billionaire-Backed Groups Launch Ad Blitz Against California Wealth Tax from the morgue, 25 Aug 2026
· 'I Know Where I Want to Live': Ex-Venture Capitalist Explains Why He'd Be Happy to Pay California Billionaire Tax from the morgue, 1 Oct 2026
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front. The byline is a pen name for a column drafted by a machine and checked by the editor: how this is made.