California Billionaires REVEALS Why They Are Leaving California
The Midnight Run: How California’s Greed Finally Broke the Golden State
As the clock struck midnight on January 1, 2026, ushering in a new year, the champagne corks popping in California’s most exclusive enclaves weren’t celebrating a fresh start. They were celebrating an escape. In a move that historians will likely look back on as the definitive end of the Golden State’s economic dominance, at least six billionaires quietly finalized their divorce from California just moments before the ball dropped. This wasn’t a casual relocation or a lifestyle choice; it was a desperate, tactical evacuation triggered by a state government so consumed by envy and fiscal illiteracy that it decided to wage war on the very people funding its existence.
The catalyst for this midnight run was as predictable as it was catastrophic: a proposed wealth tax that reads like a suicide note for a capitalist economy. Filed in late 2025, the ballot initiative threatened to impose a retroactive, one-time five percent tax on anyone with a net worth of over one billion dollars. The keyword here is retroactive. If you were a resident when the clock struck twelve, you owed the money. For a man like Google co-founder Larry Page, whose net worth hovers in the stratosphere of nearly three hundred billion dollars, staying in California for one more day would have cost him approximately thirteen billion dollars. It is no wonder that he converted his family office out of state on December 23rd and promptly purchased sprawling properties in Miami. He didn’t leave because he hates the weather; he left because California put a thirteen-billion-dollar bounty on his head.
This exodus is the culmination of years of political arrogance. For a decade, California’s leadership has operated under the delusion that its weather and coastline were enough to hold high-net-worth individuals hostage, regardless of how high the taxes climbed or how significantly the quality of life degraded. They believed they could vilify success, impose the nation’s highest marginal income tax rate of over thirteen percent, and fail to deliver basic public safety, yet the rich would stay out of loyalty. That gamble has failed spectacularly. Peter Thiel, the contrarian tech investor, finally acted on his long-held fantasy that if enough productive people left, the system would crack. He announced a new office in Miami on New Year’s Eve, taking his billions and his influence to a state that doesn’t view him as a piggy bank to be raided.
The economic illiteracy required to propose a retroactive wealth tax is staggering. The proponents of this measure estimated it could raise one hundred billion dollars for healthcare and education. It is a fantasy rooted in the idea that wealth is static, a pile of gold sitting in a dragon’s cave waiting to be seized. But wealth is mobile. Capital has feet. By threatening to confiscate assets, California didn’t raise billions; they chased away the tax base that was already paying for everything. Between 2020 and 2022 alone, the state lost twelve billion dollars in adjusted gross income to other states. With this latest wave of departures, that number will balloon, leaving a crater in the state budget that no amount of wishful thinking can fill.
David Sacks, the venture capitalist recently appointed as the White House AI and Crypto Czar, summed up the sentiment perfectly in his departure post: “God bless Texas.” He wasn’t just praising his new home; he was indicting his old one. Sacks, like many others, views the migration not just as a financial decision, but as a rejection of “socialism” and the systemic mismanagement that has turned San Francisco into a symbol of urban decay. When the people who build the future—the founders of PayPal, Palantir, and Tesla—decide that the future cannot be built in California, the state ceases to be the engine of innovation. It becomes a museum of past glories.
The writing has been on the wall since 2020, when Elon Musk, the canary in the coal mine, packed up and moved to Texas. At the time, he called California “complacent” and likened it to a sports team that had been winning for too long. He was right. The state’s leadership treated him with contempt, with one lawmaker infamously tweeting a vulgar dismissal at him. Musk replied, “Message received,” and took Tesla, SpaceX, and X (formerly Twitter) to Texas. That single exchange should be taught in every economics class as a lesson in how to destroy a local economy. When you tell the world’s richest man to get lost, he eventually will—and he will take thousands of jobs, billions in tax revenue, and the prestige of housing the world’s most advanced aerospace and automotive companies with him.
The damage goes far beyond the billionaires themselves. The argument often thrown around by class-warfare enthusiasts is that these billionaires “don’t pay their fair share,” so good riddance. This is a lie designed to placate the mathematically challenged. The top one percent of earners pay nearly half of all personal income taxes in California. When Larry Ellison moves Oracle to Austin and takes his personal fortune to Hawaii, the roads in Redwood City don’t get fixed. When Hewlett Packard Enterprise moves to Houston, the schools in Silicon Valley lose funding. The exit of high earners is a direct assault on the state’s ability to fund the very social programs the left claims to cherish. You cannot have European-style social services with a tax base that is fleeing to Florida and Texas.
The tragedy is that this was entirely preventable. States like Florida, Texas, Tennessee, and Nevada have rolled out the red carpet, offering zero income tax and a business-friendly environment. They understand that capital goes where it is treated well. Meanwhile, California has become a hostile environment, a place where success is punished and failure is subsidized. Joe Lonsdale, co-founder of Palantir, wrote about his wife being afraid to walk their daughters down the street in San Francisco. Keith Rabois described the city as so improperly run that it is impossible to stay. When you combine physical danger with fiscal predation, you don’t just lose the rich; you lose the middle class, the families, and the future.
Now, the state finds itself in a death spiral. As tax revenue plummets, the government will inevitably look to squeeze those who remain—the middle class and the working rich who can’t afford a private jet to Miami. Services will be cut, infrastructure will crumble further, and the quality of life will continue its downward trajectory. The politicians who engineered this disaster will likely face no consequences, insulated by their own rhetoric, while the average Californian pays the price for their hubris. The U-Haul growth index has ranked California last for six consecutive years. That isn’t a statistic; it’s a verdict.
The midnight run of January 1, 2026, marks the point of no return. The “wealth tax” may or may not pass in November, but the damage is already done. The threat alone was enough to sever the ties between Silicon Valley’s elite and the state that birthed them. California has forgotten the fundamental rule of a free society: you serve the people; you do not own them. By treating its most successful residents as ATMs to be broken open, California has shattered the trust that allowed it to become the world’s fifth-largest economy. The party is over, the guests have left, and the bill is coming due for everyone left behind.
