Sergey Brin Spent $100 Million to Avoid a Tax That Would Cost Him $13 Billion. Do These People Think We Can’t Do Math?

Let me tell you something. Every April, I sit at my kitchen table with a calculator, a cup of cold coffee, and a pit in my stomach, and I figure out what I owe. I don’t get to drop $20 million on a group called “Build a Better California” to make the bill go away. I don’t get to buy a house in Nevada and tell the state I live there now. I pay. We all pay. That’s the deal.

Sergey Brin has a different deal.

According to filings reported last Friday, the Google co-founder just shoveled another $20 million into Build a Better California, the organization fighting Proposition 40. That brings his total to $102 million. One hundred and two million dollars. To defeat a ballot measure that would cost him an estimated $13.3 billion in taxes. I’ll save you the math: he is spending a dollar to save a hundred and thirty. I don’t have a finance degree and I can see that’s the best return on investment in human history.

JD Lasica from Pleasanton, CA, US (CC BY 2.0) via Wikimedia Commons

Prop 40 is a one-time 5% wealth tax on roughly 200 billionaires living in California. The money goes mostly to healthcare programs. And here’s the part that should make every parent in this state want to scream: California’s Medicaid program could lose up to $30 billion in federal funding because of Trump’s budget cuts. Thirty. Billion. Dollars. So while Washington is pulling the rug out from under kids’ healthcare, the fourth-richest man on Earth is spending nine figures to make sure he doesn’t have to chip in to replace it.

I have four kids. I know what a copay costs. I know what it means when a school nurse calls and you’re praying the insurance covers the visit. Sergey Brin is worth somewhere between $267 billion and $282 billion, depending on which index you check, and he has decided that funding healthcare for the state that made him the fourth-richest man alive is simply too much to ask.

And here’s the kicker. He already moved. Brin bought a $42 million mansion on the Nevada side of Lake Tahoe and lists Nevada as his residence now. He left. But he’s still pouring money into California ballot measures to make sure the tax never passes for anyone else either. He’s not even going to live here and he’s spending $102 million to dictate what happens to our kids’ healthcare. Does that sound like a guy who cares about “building a better California”? Because it sounds like a guy who cares about building a better Sergey.

Anurag R Dubey (CC BY-SA 4.0) via Wikimedia Commons

He’s not alone, of course. Mark Zuckerberg reportedly bought a $170 million mansion near Miami. Peter Thiel, Travis Kalanick, and Brin’s own Google co-founder Larry Page have all hit the road. The billionaires are treating California like a rental car they don’t have to return clean.

Meanwhile, the group actually backing Prop 40, launched by a healthcare workers union, has raised just over $30 million. Brin alone has outspent them more than three to one. So the nurses and the aides and the people who actually change the bedpans have $30 million, and one guy who invented a search engine has $102 million. Tell me again about how the little guy has a voice in this democracy.

Governor Gavin Newsom, to his credit, opposes Prop 40 too, though for different reasons. He wants a “national billionaires’ tax” instead, which is a lovely idea that will happen approximately when pigs fly over the Capitol dome. Newsom noted that “the office worker can shoulder a higher tax rate than the heiress.” He’s right about that. He’s wrong that waiting for Congress to fix it is a plan.

Anderseidesvik (CC BY-SA 4.0) via Wikimedia Commons

And then there’s Jensen Huang. The Nvidia co-founder, who would owe about $8 billion under Prop 40, told Bloomberg in January he’s “perfectly fine” paying it. “I have not even thought about it once,” he said. One billionaire in this state looked at the bill and said, sure, that’s fair. The other one hired a political operation.

I don’t trust Sacramento to spend money wisely. I don’t trust bureaucrats further than I can throw them. But I trust a man worth $280 billion who spends $100 million to avoid a tax that funds children’s healthcare even less. At least the government pretends to answer to voters. Sergey Brin answers to nobody.

He can afford $13 billion. He just doesn’t want to. And that’s the whole story.