Larry Page has moved to Florida
twitter.comPeople don't realize that "philanthropy" is a standard way for ultra-rich to peddle influence and store their money to avoid taxes. Many philanthropies invest their donations and actually make money off investments every year, spending little. It is an investment vehicle. And an easy way to accept bribes. And for influence, take for example Bill Gates' "philanthropy" to fund charter schools and undermine public schools, ultimately enriching charter school capitalists.
This thread showcases exactly why they do this: It is enough to simply slap the name "philanthropy" on something in order to have people thinking it is good and defending you. It is an effective PR stunt, which is why they all do it. Don't be the fool.
Better dead in California than alive in Florida, to paraphrase.
>"He wasn't just pretending to move to Florida."
Do people often pretend that they're going to move? Seems like a weird thing to say.
Yes.. Florida is fine, and the weather is even nice 3-6 months/year depending on your basis of comparison.
But if you are unfathomably rich, it's missing a lot of the culture/arts/schools/dining/tier 1 medical care/things to do of a big blue city like NYC/Bay Area/whatever. It's also culturally a place who already made their money elsewhere go to flaunt it. It's a very different vibe than places people work and grow wealth.
So a lot of the uber rich already have 5 homes, one of which is Florida, and they spend exactly enough days there, creating exactly enough of a paper trail to show Florida is their primary residence.
In practice it may just be adjustments around the edges to where they already spend time. Most only do this if they are childless, the kids are out of the house, or they are extremely divorced.. since it's disruptive to kids being in school.
> it's missing a lot of the culture culture/arts/schools/dining/tier 1 medical care/things to do…
My guess is you haven’t spent much time in Miami or Florida. It’s most definitely not just theme parks and beaches.
I've spent plenty of time in Miami & Palm Beach
Sure there's stuff, but its like 1/10th the stuff
Friends who moved down ended up keeping their NYC doctors after being very unhappy with treatment, etc
There are two pretend types:
- they move their official residence and happen to stay most of the time at the "totally just rented" place in the same state anyway
- or keep telling everyone how they're going to move, but don't actually do.
Because let's be honest - if there wasn't a big reason to live where they do, and it wasn't a pain to work from another state, they wouldn't be there to begin with. They're paying the higher taxes because they benefit(ed) in some way.
They also benefit from being famous and threatening to leave.
> Do people often pretend that they're going to move?
It isn't unheard of.
Adam Carolla has been threatening to move out of California for like at least a decade at this point.
its a luxury of the ultra-rich.
they threaten to move to push legislation which way they want.
A number of my friends who belong in these very high upper brackets have suggested to me, more in sorrow than in anger, that if I am reelected they will have to move to some other Nation because of high taxes here. I shall miss them very much but if they go they will soon come back. For a year or two of paying taxes in almost any other country in the world will make them yearn once more for the good old taxes of the U.S.A.
President Franklin D. Roosevelt
Address at Worcester, Massachusetts
October 21, 1936
It's always a bluff like a kid throwing a temper tantrum going to "hold their breath".
They threaten to do this every single time there is an election in NYC. And studies have shown that they are lying. To try and manipulate people. The rich are actually far less likely to move.
Every election you have celebrities and wealthy individuals threaten to leave the country, etc. Nearly none of them follow-through, and of the ones that do, many ultimately move back.
Page left California specifically because of the so-called "Billionaire Tax", and is taking with him his family (which will inherit his vast riches), his philanthropy, his non-profits, many jobs, taxes and more. The effect will be generations of lost benefits to California.
Yeah; there's absolutely no way he could possibly support philanthropic efforts in one state from another. Nope; everyone now loses out because of it!
There is absolutely 0 reason that someone worth $270 billion needs to worry about the 5% tax. The 5% tax will reduce his estimated worth by $13.5B bringing him to a paltry $256.5B.
To put $256.5B in perspective: over two /lifetimes/, he would need to spend around $4.5MM a day to exhaust that number, assuming it did not grow exponentially over that same time.
1. The tax could cause him to sell equity he doesn't want to. It's not like he has $270B in a checking account.
2. If they do it once then why not again next year? Maybe next time it's for only $100 million or $10 million or $1 million. Eventually everyone is paying 5% of their wealth every year. Why not? That's how we got the current income tax.
3. It's the principle. Resisting these efforts sends a signal that they aren't a good idea.
4. Do we really think the money is better off in control of the incompetent CA government than invested in private enterprise or donated to charity? I don't see how it's better for it to line Newsom's Swiss bank account.
It’s supposedly a one-time tax; but, you’re right; who knows what they’ll do.
But his net worth has effectively more than doubled in 1y. I think he’ll be just fine.
> The tax could cause him to sell equity he doesn't want to. It's not like he has $270B in a checking account.
How annual income should return more than that if he can do anything at all.
> 1. The tax could cause him to sell equity he doesn't want to. It's not like he has $270B in a checking account.
If there is $270B in equity invested, making those 5% back should be rather straightforward for someone with that much wealth, a decent wealth manager would recoup that easily. Money makes money.
> 2. If they do it once then why not again next year? Maybe next time it's for only $100 million or $10 million or $1 million. Eventually everyone is paying 5% of their wealth every year. Why not? That's how we got the current income tax.
This is just a slippery slope fallacy.
> 3. It's the principle. Resisting these efforts sends a signal that they aren't a good idea.
Exactly, it's blackmailing, sending a message "look what you've made me do" when the government attempts to reign in the ultrawealthy.
> 4. Do we really think the money is better off in control of the incompetent CA government than invested in private enterprise or donated to charity? I don't see how it's better for it to line Newsom's Swiss bank account.
With this argument you can defend never paying taxes to CA then, do you think it would be better as a complete anarco-capitalist state? It makes me sad that USA's public governance is so bad that this argument is always used to defend rich people not paying taxes; the political system is so absolutely broken that people prefer to allow ultrawealthy folks to keep hoarding even in the face of very real issues fracturing society stemming from that instead of thinking about how that money could fix many public issues.
> If there is $270B in equity invested, making those 5% back should be rather straightforward for someone with that much wealth, a decent wealth manager would recoup that easily. Money makes money.
Its his voter shares, he wont get them back. Larry and Sergei currently control 51% of Google votes, if they sell any more they lose control of Google so they can't afford to sell.
I highly doubt that Larry Page has $270B only invested in one egg (Google), even if a large part of his wealth comes from that.
> Exactly, it's blackmailing, sending a message "look what you've made me do" when the government attempts to reign in the ultrawealthy.
If it’s blackmailing, it’s blackmailing that is legal and extremely common. Similar events have occurred in multiple jurisdictions around the world whenever wealth taxes are attempted. The only way to prevent this in a country like the US that doesn’t allow retroactive taxation is to institute an exit tax, but this is also not legal at the state level in the US. Oh, and you also likely need capital controls, another no-no inside the US.
Capital flight is so historically common that there’s a common phrase to describe it. I have no idea why CA thought they were any different.
According to later replies on X it's based on voting control percentage for dual class shares, so it's 40% tax, not 5%. So more than $100 billion.
> it has cost California both Larry's presence and all the tax revenue it made from him.
1. Google itself isn't moving. I don't think Larry is closely involved anymore, and a move out of state seems to prove that.
2. How much tax revenue did California even make from him? If he doesn't sell stock, then he has no capital gains to tax. That's the whole point of the wealth tax. The ultra-wealthy are infamous for tax avoidance schemes such as rotating loans against their stock to avoid capital gains.
#2 is a problem with California’s tax laws. A marginal land value tax would easily tax wealth without wealthy people having to sell assets. Also, more economic activity, such as rich people buying products and services, results in sales tax and income for other Californians.
Take that up with the CA voters circa 1979.
He better watch out. Google instituted a strict return to office mandate. They also frown on people working apart from their teams. He might have to go back and badge in a couple times a week to make it look like he’s still working out of the Mountain View office.
NYC had a similar budgetary/fiscal issue too and they thought they'd manage it by assessing more taxes on companies and people. The result was corporate as well as individual flight.
It's tough to slim down on spending. Be it individuals or governments and quasi-governmental organizations. Companies can swiftly implement spending cuts and RIFs --sometimes aggressively.
Governments, though, there are threads throughout --elected officials often trade support for positions and favoritism and if they take those away, so do many of their fiercest people who get out the vote. Also, their voters are averse to having the services they've grown accustomed to getting cut.
So sometimes you need that official who knows he or she is a one termer but will go in and cut and cut. People will hate them but it will allow the government a chance to make a turnaround.
he was freeloading in CA and now will be freeloading in FL
IMO capital gains taxes are bad as well, they discourage efficient investment allocation (you are stuck with what you have now).
It would be better if we mainly taxed consumption directly. If you are a billionaire but spend $100k/yr I am fine with you paying the same taxes as anyone else spending $100k/yr.
Taxing consumption hurts people more at the lower end of the income scale than at the higher end. It all comes down to what reserves you have to accommodate different scales of financial events. For example, will not having enough money for a tank of gas break you, or just annoy you? Could you survive needing an ambulance ride? Do copays keep you from seeing the doctor, or are they just a rounding error on your income?
I believe that taxing people proportionally on income earned by labor is a unifying element of a social contract. i.e., we are all contributing to the common good. Income from capital is "free money." You didn't work for it; you took it from somebody else in the form of interest, dividends, or some other rent-seeking financial magic.
At some point, wealth becomes corrosive to society. People acquire it just for the sake of acquiring more and building their personal power. It seems that wealth is used to build more mechanisms of rent-seeking to further extract money from people who make their money through labor.
That kind of non-beneficial use of wealth, rent-seeking, and financial magic should be the target of any tax system before taxing money earned by labor.
If having less money hurts people, then the government should give them more money.
Consumption taxes incentivize reducing waste and is pro environment. Isn't that what California is about?
>people acquire it just for the sake of acquiring more and building their personal power. It seems that wealth is used to build more mechanisms of rent-seeking to further extract money from people who make their money through labor.
So why are you a proponent of earned income taxes? Those hit people who make their money through labor. What you want is land value taxes, those hit people who make money through rent seeking (including tech companies whose assets sit on valuable land).
Consumption tax + land value tax + compensatory UBI should be a winning combination. Someone can hoard all they want but will pay when it comes time to spend the hoard.
You can also reduce or eliminate the tax on essentials like groceries.
Wealthy progressives don’t like it because many of them hold a huge portion of their wealth in housing. They imagine that they can somehow fix inequality without fixing distortions in the housing market.
As I said, I argue for some earned income tax. I'm a proponent of a progressive earned income tax as a way of reinforcing the social contract: we all contribute, we all benefit.
No one tax "solves" the problem. The problem, as I see it, is wealth hoarding beyond what any normal person would need to carry them through to the end of life. Instead of listing everything we should tax, maybe it'd be shorter to say that we look at what billionaires do to avoid taxes and close those loopholes. Then watching them again, and every time they come up with a new tax evasion strategy, fix it.
I wish I had the resources to develop an AI system that could find and document all instances of tax evasion by billionaires. But if I did that, I suspect I would need to be extra careful crossing streets, going near balconies, and reminding people that I'm not suicidal.
My issue is claiming the problem is wealth, and then wanting to tax income, which is not wealth. That is how rich people keep wealth taxes low (e.g. land value tax rates).
All wealth sits on land, and all land is already constantly appraised and subject to land value tax. It would be a trivial change to collect marginal land value tax rates using beneficial ownership.
As an additional benefit, the income tax return, which enables a ton of corruption at worst, and time waste at best, is gotten rid of.
If you are able to leverage the current value of stocks to gain personal benefit, you should be taxed on them as if you recognized the value. If you just let them sit, don't use them as collateral, don't take out loans against them, then they shouldn't be taxed.
But if you recognize some benefit based on their value, you absolutely should pay taxes on that value.
If you think wealth inequality is a societal problem, billionaires leaving to avoid taxes is a feature, not a bug.
This is a correct observation. The question is whether it’s meaningful to pursue local coherence when locality is vague. E.g. can someone at that level just declare permanent residence in a place but maintain their lifestyle in another? At country level they cover that with tax residence, I am not sure whether that’s the case between states in the US. Even as such, people who get on their plane as frequently as I get in my car are not subject to the same residence considerations.
Are they still able to own corporations in California while living out of state? Then it's still a bug.
Not really, so long as they influence affairs on planet earth, their wealth and influence will continue to cause compounding problems.
This kinda misses the larger point. How are billionaires created? By the structure of the capitalist firm. The capitalist gets all of the wealth created by the organization and unilaterally can decide what to do with it, running the organization as a dictator. That is the bug. "Billionaire" is simply the most obvious and egregious form.
The class interest of the billionaire capitalist is the same as the class interest of the millionaire capitalist is the same as the class interest of the small business owner. Unless all of the capitalists leave, the capitalist class will still control the entire economy of California.
This part from Paul Graham on his own move was eye opening:
"After we'd been in England for several years, I asked the people who do our taxes to check, and they told me that I actually saved money by moving to England. That's how high California state taxes are already."
Yeah sounds like he was really scrimping.
I have a lot of UK employees and the tax system is quite strange compared to US. One of them described it to me as a "great place to already be rich".
If you make under say $200-250k, you pay way way higher taxes in the UK. Above that, if you are in a high tax US city/state .. US total fed/state/local taxes start to pull well ahead at the $500k & $1M income levels.
Seems like a defect.
I wonder how he figures that. I'm well paid and my CA taxes are 1/3 as much as my Federal taxes. Especially in the current regime, CA taxes are not first my point of complaint.
This just reinforces my opinion that we shouldn't listen to billionaires about anything.
I feel for the tax fugitives who are too poor to afford living in California any longer.
Related previously:
Larry Page leaves California to protect $12.5B from proposed wealth tax
The story here should be “Larry Page, a billionaire, was a legal resident of California to begin with”
He can live anywhere he wants to and have residency anywhere he wants to. This sounds like “Larry can’t afford to live in Cali and is forced to “move” to Florida and never set foot in Cali ever again” He’ll move his mail and get FL Driver License and continue to chill in Cali (which he should have done decade ago
Oh no?
Oh no, his assistant will be buying all his groceries at a Florida Whole Foods instead of a California one and he'll be topping up his private jet at the Miami Airport instead of Oakland oh noooo how will California survive
What we need is worldwide open borders, except out… no one can leave once they get here
What a vomit-inducing billionaire fondling. It’s patently and provably false the taxing billionaires will make them flee and therefore society is worse off for that. It’s a disgusting narrative by greedy antisocial people who have lost every and any contact with the meaning of living in society. You wanna make things better for the world? Then fuck your disingenuous startups, pay more taxes. Fucking leeches, each and everyone of these scumbags. PG absolutely included.
This almost feels like satire.
HN rage bait
Does anything this dope post automatically make it to the front page?
A worthwhile question.
Also, worth keeping in mind how posts that are "unrelated to technology itself" could arguably trigger the hard-core contingent here. So, just like how Trump's or Elon's bloviations get flagged here, PG's posts could, in theory, also evoke the purest hacker mentality -- at scale.
Interpret it as you wish :)
From elsewhere:
Google co-founder Larry Page moved to Florida from California in early 2026, purchasing over $188 million in Miami property. He left California to avoid a proposed 5% state wealth tax targeting billionaires, shifting his primary residence and assets to Florida, which has no state income tax.
Makes sense to me. Several businesses and individuals from NYC have also moved to Florida for similar reasons. If I were hard working or creative as them to be as wealthy I would do the same and I know others here would too, they just wouldn't likely admit or say it. None of that prevents one from having a satellite office in the former state.
If I were as wealthy as them I would not mind paying a 5% tax after years of tax avoidance. But that’s just one of the many reasons why I am not as wealthy as they are.
In agreement. It strikes me as contradictory to be so wealthy you can never spend it all, but price sensitive enough to uproot your life over a tax?
To paraphrase Don Draper - That's what the money is for! (to live the life you want)
But I think for many that make that much money is a scoreboard primarily, and they've given up any normalcy of a personal life so long ago to get it that they don't really know what to do with themselves once they have the money.
Something needs to be done about the historic inequality in this country. It will undue all the “innovation” (ie selling ads and addicting people to the internet) that these tech billionaires have contributed.
Inequality will always be a thing. I am not saying it should be, just that it will be. Different people have different skill-sets, are in the right or wrong places at the right or wrong time, have different connections with people and a million other factors. Some are born with good RNG, some with a bad roll.
We as a society can barely get along with one another as this world gets more inter-connected and as more incompatible cultures are forced to mix with one another. There are too many conflicting and incompatible situations to fix before we can even get close to equality. That is the reality I can see. Perhaps if we divided ourselves up into a matrices of 512 or 1024 groups and each group populated a planet of their own then perhaps some of those planets could achieve the desired equality. Maybe. No idea how long it would last.
Even the sci-fi dream of Gene Roddenberry's totally equal future came with a lot of pain, wars, chaos and after all that there was still significant inequality and violence and this was from someone that was a staunch believe in all forms of equality. Even he had to keep it real enough or people would not be able to suspend disbelief yet still fictional enough to allow escapism.
I'm perfect fine not being as wealthy as Larry Page and having all the stress and drama that comes with it.
> Inequality will always be a thing.
If you want to engage honestly, you can start by acknowledging that there is an enormous gap between believing that "record breaking wealth inequality is bad and causing societal problems" vs "no inequality should exist in any capacity."
If I am being honest inequality will always vary wildly based on the monetary policies and all the things I mentioned. To me anything else is getting into vague unattainable unrealistic ideologies. No harm in dreaming, everyone should. No harm in envy either even if some think it is unhealthy. It's all human nature.
If someone has a gazillion gazillion gazillion mega-bucks that does not harm me in any way shape or form. More power to them. I would be fine with them also collecting medicare and social security especially if they, like me, had to pay into social security their entire working life and could not opt out.
If we can hold out for machines like a holodeck then we can truly live any fantasy and that may be a nice form of escapism. No idea how long it will be for such machines to exist.
Their 'paying in' is capped at a ridiculously low rate thanks to their continuous lobbying and equal to what doctors pay in.
Brin paid more for his new home that his lifetime charity giving according to Forbes. https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbeswealthteam/2026/02/09/ame...
looks like he paid more for his new house that what Forbes thinks he's given to charity.
And that's fine. The pay out is also on a scale. I have no desire to "rob the rich". Everyone pays into corrupt governments and fraudulent wasteful government programs. I would rather cut 50% of all programs every year to remove the burden from all citizens.
It might be fine but it's not a brag that 'the billionaire is contributing'.
Reminder that the Republican policy for 40 years has been to 'starve the beast' and in other ways sabotage government programs so that exactly your argument can be presented. Prior to that intentional sabotage by Republicans and aligned political partisans against the United States we had much less fraudulent and wasteful government. When half of the politicians/oversite/management ACTIVELY wants government (and by extension the country) to fail and engage in policies intended to created failure in the government, it's hard to have effective government.
As it pertains to monetary policies there is no left, no right, no democrats, no republicans. It's the same left and right leg attached to the same ass. Each boot will pretend to hate the other guy but its just a show to make people fight and keep them distracted. Both sides have the same agenda, they just have a different style of kicking our asses. Each side wears a different shade of lipstick.
You are basically an anarchist then. There are examples of good governance in the world, where the rule of law hasn’t been eroded by the people you are set on protecting. The problem with billionaires is more about the problem of power in the hands of a few greedy people who change the balance of power in their favor.
You are basically an anarchist then.
No I am a leave people alone that are not harming me. I am not envious and I am not a power tripper. If I want to help those in need then I will push my government to cut programs. Governments do not help those in need as they have no incentive to do so. They will pocket the money as they do every ... single ... damn ... time. This never changes and never will.
That’s simply not true, governments help billions of people in many ways, especially people with disabilities, children (ie labor protections), women, etc. You are completely disingenuous to say otherwise. Billionaires are harming many people through eroding the institutions that protect the average people (rulings like citizens united, trumps election, etc). You don’t seem like a person with a real perspective to me.
So he spent as much on his new house as his lifetime charity giving? Classy guy.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbeswealthteam/2026/02/09/ame...
How much is your lifetime charity giving, out of curiosity?
In the 10% range like the normal societal expectation (or requirement if you are religious and actually follow your religion but mine wasn't religious giving). Was higher when I made good money. Dragged down by a decade of not doing well.
Yours?
So, less than your house?
> normal societal expectation
Lol. Which society are you living in?
> Yours?
About $300. I'm not the one shaming people about their house costing more than their charity.
Western society.
My lifetime giving is more than I paid for my current house. The house in discussion for him is just one of how many that he owns? Or how many boats that count as 'second homes' under tax rules? Also consider he has paid for the entirely of this house, the average person giving 5-10% hasn't come close to paying for their house, so you need to go based off the 'already paid' amount. Also their home would be their largest asset, so going by that his largest asset for comparison would be his stock holdings, an order of magnitude larger than the cost of one of his homes.
Old boy is a billionaire, not a rando, and has proven he has zero shame. Despite starting their companies with techno-optimist claims, the robber barons had more shame/were more decent people/supported society more than the average tech billionaire.
More than .07% of my net worth, which is what his giving works out to.