Sergey Brin Confronted Gavin Newsom
bloomberg.comAlternative to archive.ph
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firefox ./1.htmThat is pretty sad. People would rather spend money on political activism instead of supporting their home state.
Imagine if they said instead - no need for tax, here is 15 billion to fund the schools.
They could be heroes but choose to be assholes.
so much at stake here, such an understated headline. i'm surprised this is bloomberg.
Fuck billionaires, their naked, craven corruption of the political system, and their making everything worse for everyone else to serve their greed.
Yeah so, how about that universal basic income where everyone whose job gets crushed by AI makes an income. But if only the billionaires have money they’re the only ones who can pay it. How do those guys like paying their share? (They don’t like it at all)
endless greed is remarkable. guys with $200B can't afford to pay taxes to the state that allowed them to gain such excessive wealth in the first place, often via government subsidy. this cancerous version of capitalism can't end quickly enough.
If we don't allow them to hold us hostage they will all leave.
Oh no, a couple thousand people, largely engaged in little more than modern conservatism, might leave the rest of us 300+ million alone for a change rather than demand fealty to their personal story and personal autonomy (fealty to which actually distracts us from our own lives); people who do nothing to assure the rest of us have food and shelter and healthcare may take their ball and go home!
How tragic.
End of the day we all have the same freedom to not care if Sergey has food shelter or lives in his car as the billionaires give themselves
End of the day we all have the ssme right to select ourselves and tell Sergey Brin "your needs aren't my problem."
I think your sentiment is a good example of massive propaganda people fall for. The wealth tax in question would tax Sergey roughly 50 billion the first year as it is written now.
HE would have to sell his ownership of Google almost immediately. This isn't about paying taxes this is about forcing owners of companies to liquidate almost entirely.
Sergei Brin is worth around $230b. The tax seeks around 5% of that, which is $11.5b. I don’t see how, when most of his net worth is in Alphabet stock, he would have to sell anything but trivial amounts of his ownership of the company to fund this. The tax is also one time, so saying things like “the first year” is extremely misleading. It seems to me like the real propaganda is your post.
I believe it's calculated based on voting equity, of which Sergey owns significantly more than 230b.
The "tax based on control" clause (quoted below) doesn't apply to public companies.
From my reading it is only equity that has monetary value that they are taxing; this has nothing to do with disgorging voting stock, it is merely intended to raise revenue.
For private companies, valuation for the purposes of this tax is company-value * max(% owned, % controlled)
From https://oag.ca.gov/system/files/initiatives/pdfs/25-0024A1%2...
Section 50303(c)(3)(C) says "For any interests that confer voting or other direct control rights, the percentage of the business entity owned by the taxpayer shall be presumed to be not less than the taxpayer's percentage of the overall voting or other direct control rights."
Section (D) says that the tax applies to earnable profit-percentage even if the prerequisites for said earn haven't occurred.
Everyone seems to be objecting to the arithmetic error, but what’s more interesting is the underlying assumption: that “Sergey Brin owes $50B” is so morally dispositive that it would end the argument.
Brin is not a sympathetic marginal case. He is the standard: founder equity, $1 salary, unrealized appreciation, deferral, and access to liquidity without needing wage income.
It is a little strange to look at a very large tax bill landing at his feet and decide that is where the scandal starts. Is the number supposed to make the idea disqualifying because it is drastically more than most people make in many lifetimes?
Said another way, the revealing part is not that someone on the internet multiplied wrong. The revealing part is how quickly the error resolves into a fairness argument on behalf of Sergey Brin, a man whose fortune is almost a laboratory specimen of the thing the regular income tax keeps failing, decade after decade, to reach.
How did you come up with 50 billion? It’s a 2% one time tax no?
Google is public, so the 5% of max(ownership, control) clause doesn't apply.
However, there are a bunch of private unicorns whose founders are subject to the tax even though their ownership is well under $1B.
See Section 50303(c)(3)(C) quoted above.
the math is not mathing today