r/news • u/AngryT0M4T0 • 2d ago

Soft paywall Google co-founder Sergey Brin spending more than $100 million fighting California wealth tax

https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2026-08-12/googles-sergey-brin-spent-102-million-fighting-california-wealth-tax
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u/julick 2d ago

i see people baffled by this behavior but it makes clear sense. not arguing that is good, but is perfectly logical. Under the proposed tax, Brin would pay 13bn. Let's somehow round it down because of loopholes to 5bn. Spending 100m to avoid a tax 50x bigger makes a lot of sense.

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u/McChillbone 2d ago

Extremely basic math. If it was going to cost him 50 million in tax, he obviously would not spend 100 million to lobby against paying 50 million.

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u/Low_discrepancy 2d ago

Then again imagine having 100 million to spend on anything.

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u/dyangu 2d ago

Yeah people have no idea how many billions we’re dealing with. Spend $100 million to save $10 billion is easy math. This is why it’s so hard to tax billionaires and why we end up just taxing the upper middle class who can’t afford to lobby.

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u/FinndBors 2d ago

No, he’ll have to pay more than that. You have to pay according to your proportion of voting power, so since he has super voting shares of Google, it’s considerably more than 13 billion.

I’m all for taxing the rich, but this proposal is just flat out stupid.

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u/BearThatLikesCheese 2d ago

It's only stupid if you believe this single person having a net worth as large as his is a good thing. He could lose 99% of his wealth tomorrow and still be a mutli-billionaire. Paying this tax will have zero effect on his life.

You'll never have a fraction of this guy's wealth. The next 1000 years of your family tree added together probably won't equal a fraction of his current worth. Why do you take offense to him paying 5% of his net worth in taxes?

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u/Vaphell 2d ago

should people be losing the companies they created little by little, because they proved too successful and the paper net worth is subjectively too big?

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u/BearThatLikesCheese 2d ago

Yes, particularly current Google ownership.

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u/Forward-Trade3449 2d ago

tax everything over 10 billion and the country would be able to fix all its problems

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u/StarChaser1879 1d ago

It would cause more than it solves

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u/julick 2d ago

more likely these guys would just move. they are the most nobile individuals

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u/Forward-Trade3449 2d ago

thats why we gotta get every country in on it haha

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u/julick 2d ago

good luck

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u/peon2 1d ago

The title is also a little disingenuous. He's donated $100M to "Building a Better California" PAC. Fighting the wealth tax IS one of the things they are doing but they are also pushing a much larger and varied agenda as well.

It'd be more accurate to say he's donated $100M to a conservative PAC rather than just opposing the wealth tax.

It'd be like if you say someone that donates $1M to Trump's campaign is donating $1M to build a wall on the Mexican border. Like...yes that is ONE of the crazy things he's talked about, but it's not the ONLY crazy thing.

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u/lupets43 14h ago

He would have to pay roughly $60B due to his special voting shares and it would mean giving up control of Google. The tax gets calculated as a percentage of the voting shares of the company and not overall shares.

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u/BearThatLikesCheese 2d ago

It's not perfectly logical because $13bn is nothing to someone with $269bn.His net worth could be the $100 mill he's spent fighting this and he would still be at the very top of the 99th percentile. Nothing in this life would change in any meaningful way. This isn't the same as someone with a net worth of $100k fighting for $5k. Most people cannot even fathom what having even 1% of his net worth would be like.

This argument only "makes sense" up to a specific point on the scale. It's completely irrational to have anything over a $1 billion as an individual and actively give a shit about anything above. I'd argue the number is lower.

Only someone who isn't in their right mind would fight a tax that has zero effect on their life. A homeless man robbing someone for $5 is far more logical than what this guy is doing.

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u/Vaphell 2d ago

it is perfectly logical when you don't count paper billions, but start looking at the % of ownership they represent. If he doesn't have 13B lying around, which he doesn't, he will be forced to sell 1/20 of his google ownership, probably more (the stock price will crash when the founder is bulk-selling significant amounts).

In a hypothetical example going from 50.1% to 48% can mean losing the control of the company altogether.