Sergey Brin is a Google co-founder, and he's one of the world's richest people, with about $273 billion dollars.
He wasn't particularly involved in politics, but when he did get involved, it was with liberal causes. He even backed Barack Obama in 2012 and was against Donald Trump in 2016.
But then, like many, the actions of the Democrats seemed to have moved him to the right.
With his outspokenly conservative girlfriend by his side, he has joined the ranks of tech executives courting Mr. Trump in his second term. Last May, he attended a fundraiser featuring Vice President JD Vance and donated nearly half a million dollars to the Republican National Committee. In September, he told the president at a White House dinner that he was “very grateful” for the administration’s support of tech companies. This March, he was named to a White House tech council and donated to a Republican candidate for governor of California who has since earned Mr. Trump’s endorsement.
Brin was most upset with the proposed California wealth tax. He even moved to the Nevada side of Lake Tahoe before the beginning of the year, just in case it went through. He's also spent about $57 million in an effort to defeat it. To him, there was a simple reason - it raised the specter of the communist ugliness he had to deal with in his youth.
Mr. Brin said in a rare statement: “I fled socialism with my family in 1979 and know the devastating, oppressive society it created in the Soviet Union. I don’t want California to end up in the same place.”
He knows what it's like to be poor. He was born in Moscow, he said, where “everybody was poor.” As a young child, he had to share a 400-foot-square apartment with his parents and grandparents.
Then his father visited Poland and realized how much more there was to the world, and got his family to the United States, which he said was an "awakening." No one appreciates America more than those who have lived under the boot of an oppressive regime.
Brin has been very upset by "the leftward drift of the Democratic Party." He even created two non-profit groups to push his agenda. And now the people he's assembled are not just talking about the wealth tax.
[T]he group has explicitly said it offers both “the near-term and longer-term protection against wasteful government spending and any and all new taxes on personal property and personal assets.”
Now that would be great news for California and beyond.
He's also likely been helped on the right path by his very MAGA girlfriend, Gerelyn Gilbert-Soto. That may have led to him donating to a Republican gubernatorial candidate.
Ms. Gilbert-Soto has been promoting a different candidate for governor: Steve Hilton, a Republican former Fox News host endorsed by Mr. Trump. Mr. Brin gave about $40,000 to back Mr. Hilton, whom he has long known because the candidate’s wife is a former Google executive.
Hilton said:
“I laid out my plans for how I think that we need to go in a different direction in California,” Mr. Hilton said. “And he seemed to agree with much of that — not necessarily all of it — but enough to support my campaign financially, which I hugely appreciated.”
As we've noted, Brin isn't the first billionaire galvanized by the wealth tax proposal who suddenly woke up.
The Democrats' response was to shrug off the exodus. They didn't care about what the result might be of causing this flight, or if the billionaires all moved their businesses and the jobs they create out as well.
Chamath Palihapitiya, tech venture capitalist and co-host of the All-In podcast, lambasted this kind of attitude and how Elon Musk had left because of this kind of attitude, which cost California tens of billions in taxes.
Here's what he said:
It has helped expose how fiscally broken California is. If it is not obvious to you, it should be.
Yet these politicians refuse to change. Refuse to do audits and spend less. Instead, they now target others down the list and keep asking for more. There is no amount of “more money” that will fix theft, financial profligacy and mismanagement by incompetent elected officials.
We need wholesale reforms in California before the state goes bankrupt.
California has the chance to make a significant change with the governor's race, and new actions like this may help everyone move in the right direction.
