Proposition 40, the California proposal for a one-time 5% tax on the state's billionaires, appeared headed for defeat Wednesday after a spending blitz exceeding $300 million by some of the state's wealthiest residents helped turn a potentially landmark effort to make plutocrats pay their fare share into one of the most expensive ballot…
Page F134From§Eachthe afternoon edition — 4 November 2026
California billionaires spend $300 million defeating the $100 billion tax bill they would have owed themselves.
As it ran on the front
On August 25th, two advertising groups opened for business under the names 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. Their target was a single line on November's ballot: a one-time, five percent tax on the wealth of the roughly two hundred Californians worth more than a billion dollars apiece. The filing behind that line put those two hundred fortunes at $2.3 trillion combined, and the one-time take, if the measure passed, at up to $100 billion — ninety percent of it marked for healthcare, the rest for schools and food assistance.
Not every name on that roll joined the ad buy. On October 1st, John O'Farrell, a former partner at Andreessen Horowitz, posted a twelve-part explanation of why he intended to pay the tax and stay in the state regardless of the vote.…
…(cont) On October 19th, the dinner came due. Brin, who by then had put more than $100 million of his own money into defeating the measure, sat at Donald Trump's left hand at Mar-a-Lago, at a fundraising dinner hosted by the pro-Trump super PAC MAGA Inc. The guest list for that dinner is not itemized in the record; how many at the table could price a gallon of milk is a count the filing does not answer.
By October 27th the total had cleared Brin's own number.
With sixty percent of the state's ballots counted Wednesday, Proposition 40 was losing, 56 to 44. The five percent asked for remains, for now, uncollected. The $300-plus million spent to keep it that way has already cleared.
“Two hundred people worth two-point-three trillion dollars spent three hundred million dollars rather than write a check for a nickel on the dollar — that's not a campaign, that's a payoff with a logo. The hundred billion that was supposed to go to hospitals and school lunches just didn't show up, and it didn't show up because the people who had it paid to make sure it wouldn't. Do the math yourself: that's more than a million and a half dollars apiece to keep their own tax bill at zero.”
“Look, $300 million sounds like a lot, but that's just robust civic engagement protecting jobs and investment — it's not about ducking a five-percent bill, it's about principle. Wait, it's a one-time tax, so there's no ongoing burden to protect against here — did I say that? That doesn't sound like me. The point is, two hundred people outspending the rest of the state to kill one ballot measure is democracy working exactly as intended.”
The receipts
The California Post is taking a look at the most important Golden State propositions today and how each prop presently stands
· A Wealth Tax on Billionaires? California Voters to Decide Prop 40 from the morgue, 20 Oct 2026
· Sanders: Billionaires Fighting Prop 40 Would 'Rather Poor Kids With Cancer Die Than Pay a Little More in Taxes' from the morgue, 27 Oct 2026
· As Millions Struggle to Get By, Plutocrat Working to Kill California Billionaire Tax Dines With Trump from the morgue, 19 Oct 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
· Billionaire-Backed Groups Launch Ad Blitz Against California Wealth Tax from the morgue, 25 Aug 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.