California Billionaires: ‘Get Me the Hell Out of Here’

The pace of billionaires leaving California seems to have slowed down but it hasn’t stopped. The Washington Post spoke to a tax attorney who has four wealthy clients eager to leave the state.

David Lesperance, a tax attorney, said that four of his clients, worth $600 billion collectively, have set relocation plans into motion — three to Florida and one to Texas. “Every one of my clients who ran the numbers [after Thanksgiving] came back immediately and said get me the hell out of here,” he said. “This is now a no-brainer.”

Fox Business has a similar report:

As California’s proposed “billionaire tax” began gaining momentum late last year, some of the wealthiest people in the country didn’t wait for ballots, lawmakers or court challenges — they moved. “Then a couple more flew into Miami, bought properties and closed within seven days,” luxury real estate broker Julian Johnston of The Corcoran Group told Fox News Digital. “So then it was a tipping point.”

According to Johnston — who told Fox News Digital that he’s currently working with three billionaires to move them from California to South Florida — the urgency was driven by staggering potential losses.

“One client said, ‘You know, this could be like a $5 billion tax for me,’” he recalled. “So they’re moving because of that.”

The pushback on this has come from academics who argue that billionaires aren’t really eager to move because they prefer to be close to where all the other billionaires are living. However, even these academics admit everyone has a limit.

Researchers say that while these elites appear to be stateless, jet-setting around the world to multiple homes and yachts on private aircraft, they tend to cluster together. Most stay where they built their business empires and where their social stock is high — officially changing their state of residence far less often than the average American, said Cristobal Young, a sociology professor at Cornell University who has written a book on how different tax structures impact the migration patterns of wealthy people.

“They are powerful insiders, and they are really well connected, and for them moving away to a place where they are really less connected and their personal, professional, and business networks aren’t there with them anymore,” said Young. “That’s not a good deal.”…

“In general this story that the rich are mobile … is just not true and is the basis of a weak argument against taxing the rich,” he said. “But everyone has a tipping point.”

Billionaire venture capitalist Ben Horowitz, who resides in Las Vegas, recently echoed the point on a tech podcast: “It’s been so hard to break the Silicon Valley network effect,” he said. The tax, however, was “the best strategy I’ve seen.” Horowitz didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Part of what may be different this time around is the assumption by many on the left that billionaires owe the state not just a tax on their income or investments but on whatever they own. That’s how tech journalist Kara Swisher was talking about the proposed tax on a recent podcast. “So why don’t we just do shock and awe at this point because you don’t seem to be availing yourself to thinking that you owe your state something more,” she said.

🚨 Kara Swisher on California’s Wealth Tax

“You made all your money in California, you ungrateful piece of sh*t. You could figure out a way to pay more taxes, and we deserve the taxes from you.” pic.twitter.com/v3v8JoyClU

— Chief Nerd (@TheChiefNerd) January 17, 2026

This seems to be the main sentiment from commenters on that Washington Post story about the billionaires leaving the state. Here’s the top comment:

When you have already got more money than you can spend in several lifetimes, what do you achieve by finding more ways to avoid paying tax?

What you achieve, for starters, is maintaining the fundamental idea that money belongs to the people who earn it through their contributions (starting useful new companies) not to the state simply because the state is overspending under the directive of elected Democrats.

Billionaires will do whatever they can to avoid paying back to the very society that allowed them to become billionaires in the first place. The nation has $38 trillion of debt, not counting state and local debt. If someone can grow their wealth to $600 billion without paying any significant income or wealth taxes, something is seriously wrong.

I’ve made this point many times before but you could seize 100% of the wealth of all the billionaires in America and it wouldn’t cover our collective debt. In fact it wouldn’t even cover 25% of that debt. So this framing of the issue does not show that billionaires are paying too little. It shows that the US is spending too much (mostly on entitlement programs and debt service).

Talk about biting the hand that feeds you. Have these Tech billionaires (or lowly millionaires) given a thought as to WHY they succeeded in California (or the US)? Why did they not succeed in Chad (or Louisiana)? You need strong, stable public and private institutions and infrastructure. You need a good university system, you need good public infrastructure (roadways, transportation, airports), you need access to capital, you need access to large, stable markets, you need a stable legal system. OK, you guys benefited from this and now don’t want to pay for it.

Another thing you need for this to work is the government not seizing the assets of everyone who succeeds. That’s how the system has worked in California up to now and it’s a big part of why it has worked. Changing the rules dramatically and then expecting it to work the same is a bad bet.

The term exodus implies a large number of people fleeing. I imagine the tiny cadre of ultrarich will find a way to minimize the tax. A few will actually leave and then find they miss CA. We won’t miss them.

This is dumb. There is about $2 trillion in total wealth controlled by about 200 billionaires in California but it’s not distributed evenly. Three of the five richest people in the state have already left. In all, about $1 trillion of the total wealth is already leaving. California will miss them when their departure blows an even bigger hole in the budget. This is precisely why Gov. Newsom is against this.

Good riddance! California didn’t build itself on unicorn IPOs and tax breaks. If billionaires want to leave because they finally owe a fair share for schools and healthcare, maybe that’s exactly the reset California needs.

I hope we have some billionaire readers in California. Your presence is not appreciated so why stay? I could keep going with these all day but how about one more:

The reason poverty exists is not because we can’t feed the poor, it’s because we can’t satisfy the rich. That’s exactly what we’re seeing with Elon Musk become the first trillionaire. This is a spiritual sickness. What leads a person to accumulate more money than they could possibly spend in a hundred lifetimes when we have people starving in this one?

This argument that rich people don’t “need” the money is made by midwits who think of billionaires as people who do nothing but go around buying houses and yachts. What they miss is that billionaires have money because they created something of great value to lots of people. Having more money isn’t about having more houses, it’s often about investing in more businesses to create new things people want or need. That’s what Palmer Luckey did with his billions. He started Anduril. That’s what Elon Musk did with his hundreds of millions, he started Tesla and Space X.

The people who have the money have it because they’ve already contributed something of significant value to the world and; therefore, it makes sense to let them decide what to do with the profits from those ventures. Having California’s elected officials seize that money not only ensures that the state’s budget won’t get balanced, it also prevents the people who have already contributed to the world can’t invest in something else useful. It’s a lose-lose proposition for America.

The California plan is to spend all of this “one time” wealth tax money in four years. What is California’s plan once that money is spent? Can anyone explain it? I think we all know what it is. They’ll announce another “one-time” tax, probably with a lower threshold to make up for the billionaires who have already left. It’s an unsustainable way to shore up the budget and sets the state up for an even bigger fall when the money runs out.

Update: Makers vs. takers could be on the ballot.

The fight over the “Billionaire Tax” has uncovered the following truth:

A small group of people are trying to normalize being an unaccomplished grifter who can’t make hard decisions and would rather take from winners even if it’s illegal or unconstitutional. In doing so, it…

— Chamath Palihapitiya (@chamath) January 19, 2026

The fight over the “Billionaire Tax” has uncovered the following truth:

A small group of people are trying to normalize being an unaccomplished grifter who can’t make hard decisions and would rather take from winners even if it’s illegal or unconstitutional. In doing so, it would torch the 4th largest economy in the world! This is what little care they have for the future. 

So, do you want to tell your kids that being a loser is ok? Don’t try, just take from others. Or do you want to tell them that you get out of a system what you put in and adults need to step up and make hard decisions. 

Let’s vote on the tax so we can decide where the State of California stands and  ultimately when this insane push to socialism ends.