California voters are rejecting a proposal to impose a wealth tax on billionaire residents, marking a major win for tech and business executives, who spent hundreds of millions against the measure, according to a projection from Decision Desk HQ (DDHQ). According to DDHQ's analysis, 54 percent voted against the measure, while 46 percent…
Page F136From§Eachthe evening edition — 7 November 2026
California's billionaire tax loses twice: once at the ballot, once in Newsom's own measure.
As it ran on the front
On Tuesday, California voters rejected Proposition 40, the Billionaire Tax Act, a one-time 5 percent levy on the net worth of the roughly 250 Californians who hold enough of it to owe one. Decision Desk HQ's projection, released Saturday, put the no vote at 54 percent, the yes at 46. That result is the top of the filing. The rest of it is dated earlier.
On Oct. 9, Gov. Gavin Newsom endorsed Proposition 42. The measure was built to do two things at once: cancel, retroactively, whatever tax Prop 40 imposed, and prohibit, going forward, any tax on the ownership of financial assets or personal property in the state of California.…
…(cont) In a dispatch published Oct. 11, Debru Carthan, vice president of SEIU-UHW, the union leading the campaign for Prop 40, read the endorsement plainly: "He's showing California his true colors." The filing does not record what color that is. It records only that the governor of the state proposing the tax moved, by name, to cancel it.
On Oct. 27, Sen. Bernie Sanders totaled the other side of the ledger. Billionaires opposed to Prop 40 had put up $333 million to defeat it. Sanders named what they were not spending that money against: homelessness, cancer, child poverty. He named what they were spending it against: a 5 percent tax.
Run the two columns together and they close. Tuesday's vote cost the opposition $333 million and produced a 54-46 no. Oct. 9's endorsement cost the opposition nothing extra, because the governor supplied it, and it would have produced the identical no whether Tuesday broke 54-46 or 90-10. Two instruments, one outcome, financed from two directions: the money that beat the tax at the ballot, and the measure that beat it before the ballot existed.
“This is the oldest trick in the book: you don't just outspend the vote, you make sure the vote can't change anything no matter how it comes out. Newsom signed onto the kill switch in October, and now they'll stand up and say California "decided" against taxing billionaires. It decided against a tax that was already arranged to lose.”
“Prop 42 isn't anti-tax, it's pro-certainty — California can't go taxing people retroactively, that's just sound governance, and the governor was protecting the investment climate. Sure, it also bars any future tax on financial assets forever, for everyone, but — did I say forever? That doesn't sound like something that would actually show up in a ballot measure.”
The receipts
· I’m a wealthy Californian. The billionaire tax is a win for everyone from the morgue, 2 Nov 2026
· Newsom backs California ballot measure that cancels out billionaire tax proposal from the morgue, 13 Oct 2026
· Newsom Endorses Ballot Measure That Would Cancel Out Billionaire Tax—and Ban Future Wealth Taxes from the morgue, 11 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
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.