A California ballot measure that would impose a one-time 5% tax on residents worth more than $1 billion has collected enough signatures to appear on the November ballot.
Backers led by Service Employees International Union-United Healthcare Workers West say they gathered more than 1.5 million signatures, well above the roughly 875,000 required. Pending sign-off from state officials, voters will decide the measure this fall. The proposed tax targets about 200 people statewide, residents who together hold an estimated $2 trillion in wealth but reportedly pay less than 1.5% of it in taxes. Organizers estimate the tax could generate about $100 billion over five years, with money directed toward Medi-Cal, public education, food assistance programs, and offsetting federal healthcare cuts.
Not all billionaires are fighting it. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said he’s “perfectly fine with it,” a notable break from the Silicon Valley money flooding into opposition campaigns. SFist has been tracking the billionaire opposition since early in the signature drive.
Crypto executive Chris Larsen contributed $5 million to an anti-tax PAC called Golden State Promise. Sergey Brin helped fund a separate group called Building a Better California, expected to spend tens of millions backing rival measures designed to crowd the ballot and split voter attention. Local tech investor Ron Conway reportedly funded another opposition group that tried to get Governor Gavin Newsom and San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie to appear in ads against the tax.
Newsom didn’t endorse the measure. He warned it could push wealthy residents out of state and shrink California’s tax base, a concern echoed in a new economic report being prepared by consultants who worked under former governors Jerry Brown and Arnold Schwarzenegger. That report claims the measure would cost the state roughly 108,000 high-paying jobs and billions in revenue over the next two decades, with particular damage to the early-stage AI industry.
Senator Bernie Sanders supports the measure.
Suzanne Jimenez, a leader of SEIU-UHW, pushed back hard on those projections. “When our growing coalition files these signatures, David will have won the first round against Goliath,” Jimenez said, “but healthcare workers and our allies won’t quit until we fully protect our patients from the looming healthcare disaster.” She told reporters Monday that the signature count shows frontline healthcare workers won’t be outspent into irrelevance, dismissing the billionaire-funded opposition as “controversial billionaires” trying to kill a proposal most Californians haven’t heard from yet.
The scale of that opposition is worth keeping in mind. Anti-tax groups don’t just run ads. They fund competing ballot measures, hire signature gatherers to muddy the waters, and in this case reportedly tried to recruit the governor and a big-city mayor as spokespeople. It’s a playbook California voters have seen before on measures touching corporate interests, and it costs real money to execute.
The union’s 1.5 million signatures, almost double the legal threshold, give backers a substantial cushion against disqualification challenges. California’s Secretary of State office still needs to certify the count, a process that can take weeks and sometimes surfaces enough invalid signatures to knock a measure off. Getting nearly twice the minimum is how campaigns protect against exactly that outcome.
The Franchise Tax Board would administer the tax if it passes, adding a new category to the state’s existing wealth reporting requirements. Critics note that calculating net worth on an annual basis, particularly for individuals holding illiquid assets like private company equity or real estate, creates compliance challenges that don’t exist with income taxes. Supporters argue the roughly 200 people affected have more than adequate resources to work that out.
Voters will see the question in November alongside what could be a crowded field of competing and counter-measures, depending on how many of the opposition-backed proposals qualify in the weeks ahead.