Governor Of California SHOCKED As IRS Data Exposes Why Every Billionaire Is LEAVING California

[00:00:00]A boy grows up in Lansing, Michigan, in a house full of computers. His father is a computer science professor. His mother teaches computer programming. By age six, the machines are everywhere. By age 12, he tells his friends he's going to start a company one day. He's the first kid in his school to hand in a homework assignment typed on a word processor. He goes to the University of Michigan, builds a printer out of LEGO bricks just to see if he can, gets into the PhD program at Stanford. In 1995, he meets a fellow student and the two of them have an idea. He wakes up one night from a literal dream about downloading the entire internet. They build a server out of LEGO bricks in a rented garage in Menlo Park. A single check for $100,000.

[00:00:39]That's the whole company at the start.

[00:00:41]They name it after a math word, a word meaning 10 to the power of 100. They never look back. Within a decade, it's the most visited website on Earth.

[00:00:50]Within two, he's worth over $270 billion. He's one of the most powerful men alive, and he built all of it. Every line of code, every data center, every dollar in California. And then, California came for him. That man is Larry Page, and what he did next, quietly, without a single public statement, sent a signal through every boardroom in Silicon Valley. But, there's one number in the IRS data that exposes exactly what this departure is costing California, and Sacramento doesn't want you doing the math. You don't have to live in California for this to matter. The same thing is on its way to your state. Subscribe to the channel because this story has layers nobody else is unpacking. Let's get into it. So, here's what actually happened.

[00:01:30]December 2025, Sacramento. A union, the SEIU-UHW, Service Employees International Union, United Healthcare Workers West, filed a ballot initiative called the 2026 California Billionaire Tax Act. The proposal, a one-time 5% tax on the net worth of every California resident worth more than $1 billion.

[00:01:51]Not income tax, not capital gains, a tax on everything you own. Your stocks, your art, your companies, your intellectual property, including unrealized gains, money you've never cashed. And it would apply retroactively to anyone who lived in California as of January 1st, 2026.

[00:02:09]You don't have to wait for voters to approve it. You just have to be in the state on that date. The pitch from supporters, the tax would raise $100 billion, fund healthcare, fund education, fill the budget gaps created by federal funding cuts. California has more billionaires than any other state.

[00:02:25]Nearly half the state's personal income tax revenue, the financial spine of a $350 billion budget, comes from the top 1% of earners alone. What they didn't account for was what happens when you tell $2 trillion worth of people they have a deadline to stay or pay. Larry Page didn't become Larry Page by accident. Born in 1973 in Lansing, Michigan to a family that treated computers like other families treated dinner tables, they were just always there and everyone used them. His father, Carl Page, was a pioneer in artificial intelligence at Michigan State University, one of the first people in the country to earn a computer science PhD. His mother taught computer programming. The house was full of machines and scientific journals. He was immersed before he could fully read. He went to the University of Michigan, built machines for fun, joined the solar car team, then Stanford PhD program, computer science. In 1995, he meets Sergey Brin, another doctoral student.

[00:03:21]The two of them become obsessed with a problem. How do you rank information on the internet, by keywords, but by relevance? Page has a literal dream about downloading the entire web and mapping its link structure. He wakes up and writes it all down. That dream becomes the PageRank algorithm. PageRank becomes Google. They start in a rented garage in Menlo Park, one server built from hardware parts encased in LEGO bricks. The first outside check, $100,000 written by Sun Microsystems co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim on the hood of a car in a parking lot. They didn't even have a bank account yet. They named the company after a Google, 10 to the power of 100, because the scale of information they want to organize is unimaginable. By 1998, Google is live.

[00:04:06]By 2004, it's public. By 2019, Page steps back from day-to-day operations.

[00:04:11]By 2025, he's worth $270 billion, the world's second richest person, and California's single most valuable resident by a long way. And then, Sacramento proposed a bill him for 5% of all of it. And on December 23rd, 2025, the filings appeared in the California Secretary of State's database. No press conference, no open letter, no statement of principle, just legal paperwork.

[00:04:35]Page's family office, Koop LLC, reincorporated out of California. His influenza research fund, Flu Lab LLC, reincorporated out of California. His flying car startup, One Arrow, re-listed its primary address in Florida. All done before the January 1st deadline. All done in silence. That's the cliff this video opened on. That's what sent shockwaves through every boardroom in Silicon Valley. The richest man in the state packed up his legal entities and left without a word. But he wasn't alone, and that's where this gets bigger. Sergey Brin, Page's co-founder, left California for Miami. Peter Thiel, the venture capitalist who co-founded PayPal, already in Miami. Travis Kalanick, former CEO of Uber, who built his company in San Francisco, announced he had left for Texas in December. Don Hankey, the Los Angeles car loan billionaire, Las Vegas. Steven Spielberg, the filmmaker, New York. Six publicly confirmed billionaire departures by the January 1st snapshot date. Researchers note many more may have quietly left without public announcements. Now, California Governor Gavin Newsom tried to fight this. At a Bloomberg event in San Francisco in January 2026, he said, quoting directly, "I was burdened by the facts. The fact is, it actually will reduce investments in education. It will reduce investments in teachers and librarians, child care.

[00:05:55]It will reduce investments in fighting and police." His own governor acknowledging on camera that this is a disaster. He told the New York Times, "For months I've been fighting this because it's exactly what I feared would happen, and now it has." He was warning about it. His own party was still pushing it. But here's what makes this bigger than one billionaire's exit because Page and Brin didn't leave an vacuum. They left a tax base behind them. A tax base California state government has built its entire budget model around. Walk into a startup's accounting office in San Francisco right now. The founder just told the team he moved his holding company to Delaware.

[00:06:29]His name is on this year's California tax filing. It won't be there next year.

[00:06:34]Now multiply that across every venture backed company, every tech executive, every fund manager who looked at the January 1st deadline and quietly made the same calculation Page did. Here's the fundamental math California's politicians won't say out loud. The top 1% of earners in this state pay 39% of all personal income tax. 39%. The state is structurally dependent on a small group of people paying an enormous share, and that group just started leaving. The IRS migration data already showed the warning signs before the billionaire tax was ever proposed.

[00:07:05]California was losing high earner households at three times the pre-pandemic rate. The Legislative Analyst's Office flagged it. Foregone income tax from out-migration had already jumped from 0.5% of revenue to 1.6% in a single fiscal year. Chief Executive Magazine ranked California dead last in its best and worst states for business survey for 2025. That was the 14th year in a row. The billionaire tax didn't create this problem. It accelerated it.

[00:07:33]Now we get to the number I told you about at the start. The one Sacramento doesn't want you doing the math on. Here it is. Stanford's Hoover Hoover senior fellow, Joshua Rauh, ran 100,000 simulations on the proposed billionaire tax. The SEIU claimed it would raise $100 billion for California. Here's what Rau found. Six departures, just the six publicly confirmed ones, stripped $536 billion from California's billionaire tax base, nearly 30% of the entire taxable pool gone before a single vote was cast. Once you model migration patterns and account for the billionaires who left quietly, expected revenue drops from $100 billion to to 40 billion, less than half of what was promised. But the real cost isn't the wealth tax you didn't collect, it's the income tax you'll never collect again.

[00:08:19]Every billionaire who leaves California stops paying California income tax permanently. Rau's team calculated the present value of all those future income tax payments now gone. Once you factor in permanent lost revenue, the math inverts completely. The Hoover study estimates the net present value of the billionaire tax at negative $24.7 billion. Not a gain, a loss. For every dollar of wealth tax the state collects, it forfeits $6 of future income tax revenue. "Proponents would liquidate Silicon Valley for an extra $2 billion per year," Rau said. "That's the number nobody at the capital wants to talk about. And it gets worse. California already faces an $18 billion budget deficit for 2026 to 2027, $5 billion larger than projected. The state has needed to address budget problems for 3 years straight, a $27 billion deficit in 2023 to 2024, $55 billion in 2024 to 2025, $15 billion in 2025 to 2026." The California Tax Foundation estimates billionaire out-migration alone is already cutting annual revenue by 3.3 to 4.5 billion dollars per year. The top 1% of earners shoulder 39% of all personal income tax, and they're the ones leaving. And here's what the people in charge are actually doing about it.

[00:09:35]Newsom has been vocally opposed to the billionaire tax, a remarkable position for a California Democratic governor. He says the tax should be handled at the national level, not state by state, but his opposition creates a different problem. Polling by the Tax the Greedy Billionaires Coalition found that if Newsom continues opposing the tax, his favorability drops 28 points with certain voter blocks. He's caught between the math and his party's base, and neither side is letting him off the hook. He said it himself at the Bloomberg event, "The impact of a one-time tax does not solve an ongoing structural challenge." He's right, but his own administration has presided over three consecutive years of budget crises. 27 billion, 55 billion, 15 billion in successive deficits. Opposing one tax proposal doesn't fix a decade of spending growth that outpaces revenue.

[00:10:23]And here's where Page fails, too. The man who built his fortune in California, who benefited from its universities, its talent pipeline, its infrastructure for 30 years, left without a single public statement. No fight, no letter, no pushback, no campaign. He filed the paperwork and was gone. The man who once described his life's mission as organizing the world's information couldn't manage one sentence to the state that made him. Both sides are failing the people caught in the middle.

[00:10:50]This isn't only a California story.

[00:10:52]Washington state has proposed its own wealth tax. New York is exploring one.

[00:10:56]Illinois is watching closely. The same playbook, the same math, the same result. IRS data doesn't lie. Capital moves where it's welcomed, and right now it's being welcomed in Texas, Florida, and Nevada. So, let's bring it full circle. We start with a boy from a Michigan professor's house, surrounded by computers and scientific journals, who tells his friends at 12 that he'll build a company, who goes to Stanford, has a literal dream about the internet, builds a server out of LEGO bricks in a California garage, and creates the most visited website in the history of the world. He builds it in California. He grows it in California. He pays taxes in California for 30 years, and the moment Sacramento proposed billing him for 5% of all of it on paper gains he never even cashed, he filed three pieces of paperwork quietly and was gone. Here's the bottom line. California built its entire budget model on the assumption that the people who create enormous wealth will stay and pay for the privilege of having created it here. The IRS data, the census data, the Hoover Institution math, they all say the same thing. That assumption is wrong. You cannot run a $350 billion budget where 39% of revenue comes from your top 1% of earners and then systematically drive those earners out. The math doesn't work. And whether you live in California or you're watching this from a completely different state, this does affect you. When California's economy contracts, the ripple hits everywhere.

[00:12:20]And because your state might be next, Washington is already proposing a wealth tax, New York is watching, and the playbook travels fast. If this opened your eyes, hit that like button.

[00:12:30]Subscribe to the channel. We're tracking every thread of this story as it develops. And drop a comment. Do you think California's billionaires should have stayed and paid? Or did they have no choice? Let's talk about it. The kid who organized the world's information in a California garage finally organized his own exit, and the state that made him is now doing the math on what it lost.