The Trial of the Billionaires
Silicon Valley promised a revolution. Is a counterrevolution coming?
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Arena Magazine promotes an article about the upcoming vote on a wealth tax on California's billionaires, proposing a one-time state tax equal to 5 percent of their net worth. The article, presented by Plaid, discusses the potential implications of the ballot initiative and its possible effects on the state's economy. Plaid is highlighted as the infrastructure needed for AI to work in finance.
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Telling the Great American Story, in Print!
The Trial of the Billionaires
Silicon Valley promised a revolution. This November, Californians will vote on whether they want a counterrevolution, instead. By Julia Steinberg.
Today's email is presented by Plaid
The wheel needed roads. Electricity needed the grid. Every great leap forward has needed something built underneath it to actually work at scale. AI is today's great leap. But in order to work in finance, it needs the infrastructure to make it accurate and dependable. Plaid is that infrastructure.
Can you vote for or against technological progress? In most elections, it’s not that simple. But this November, Californians will have as close an opportunity as any group of voters has ever had to do so. That opportunity comes in the form of a ballot initiative proposing a wealth tax on the state’s billionaires. Prop 40, sponsored by SEIU-United Healthcare Workers West, one of California’s largest labor unions, is summarized as follows: “billionaires who were residents of California on January 1, 2026 would have to pay a one-time state tax equal to 5 percent of their net worth. The tax would be due in 2027.”
You may be asking yourself whether anyone — for or against it — could actually believe that, if passed, the wealth tax would be a “one-time” measure rather than the first of many. California has no plans to slow its rate of spending, trending to almost $400 billion annually. The measure’s official summary tells voters that “Ninety percent of the money would have to be spent on health care services for the public. The rest would have to be spent on education, food assistance, and administration of the wealth tax.”
California is infamous for its high taxes, but young people head west anyway, because that’s where the gold is. These two economic facts have coexisted for decades. Because California has supported so much of American technocapitalism in the last half century, it would have been hard to imagine a measure as extreme as a confiscatory wealth tax gaining serious traction. But Prop 40 has a real chance of passing in a few months. Something has changed in how the public views technology and the wealthy. That something is AI. And so, while Prop 40 presents itself as a tax on the ultrarich to prop up healthcare and education spending in California, it really should be thought of as a referendum on AI.
Of California’s 200 or so billionaires, most did not make their wealth by innovating in AI. A few did — like Cursor’s Michael Truell, Anthropic’s Dario Amodei, or Scale AI’s Alexandr Wang. Most made their wealth in the infrastructure of the technology boom that began with personal computers and exploded with the Internet. Sergey Brin, Eric Schmidt, and Jensen Huang were all rich before the AI wave (though they are considerably richer because of it). The state’s official ballot analysis, from the Legislative Analyst’s Office, tells us as much. “California Is Home to Many Billionaires,” the document says. “Many of these billionaires gained their wealth as executives or investors in California technology companies.”
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