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Khanna Hits Back as Silicon Valley Oligarchs Threaten Primary Challenge Over California Billionaires Tax
"We cannot have a nation with extreme concentration of wealth in a few places, but where... healthcare, childcare, housing, education is unaffordable," the San Francisco lawmaker said.
Dec 28, 2025
US Rep. Ro Khanna defended California's proposed tax on extreme wealth Saturday after a pair of prominent Silicon Valley venture capitalists threatened to launch a primary bid for his California House seat.
The proposal, which advocates are gathering signatures to place on the ballot in 2026, would impose a one-time 5% tax on those with net worths over $1 billion to recoup about $90 billion in Medicaid funds stripped from the state by this year’s Republican budget law. The roughly 200 billionaires affected would have five years to pay the tax.
While higher taxes on the superrich are overwhelmingly popular with Americans, the proposal has rankled many of California’s wealthiest residents, as well as California’s Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom, who said earlier this month that he’s “adamantly” against the measure.
On Friday, the New York Times reported that two of the valley's biggest powerbrokers—venture capitalist and top Trump administration ally Peter Thiel and Google co-founder Larry Page—were threatening to reduce their ties to California in response to the tax proposal.
This has been a common refrain from elites faced with proposed tax increases, though data suggests they rarely follow through on their threats to bail on cities and states, even when those hikes are implemented. Meanwhile, the American Prospect has pointed out that the one-time tax would still apply to those who moved out of the Golden State.
Khanna (D-Calif.), who is both a member of the House's progressive faction and a longtime darling of the tech sector, has increasingly sparred with industry leaders in recent years over their reactionary stances on labor rights, regulation, and taxation.
In a post on X, the congressman reacted with derision at the threats of billionaire flight: "Peter Thiel is leaving California if we pass a 1% tax on billionaires for five years to pay for healthcare for the working class facing steep Medicaid cuts. I echo what [former President Franklin D. Roosevelt] said with sarcasm of economic royalists when they threatened to leave, 'I will miss them very much.'"
Casado, who donated to Khanna’s 2024 reelection campaign according to OpenSecrets, complained that “Ro has done a speed run, alienating every moderate I know who has supported him, including myself.”
"Beyond being totally out of touch with [the moderate] faction of his base, he’s devolved into an obnoxious jerk," Casado continued. "At least that makes voting him the fuck out all the more gratifying."
Casado's post received a reply from another former Khanna donor, Garry Tan, the CEO of the tech startup accelerator Y Combinator.
"Time to primary him," Tan said of Khanna.
Tan, a self-described centrist Democrat, has never run for office before. But he is notorious for his social media tirades against local progressives in San Francisco and was one of the top financial backers of the corporate-led push to oust the city's liberal former district attorney, Chesa Boudin, in 2022.
Casado replied: "Count me in. Happy to be involved at any level."
Progressive commentator Krystal Ball marveled that “Tech oligarchs are now openly conspiring against Ro Khanna because he dared to back a modest wealth tax.”
So far, neither Casado nor Tan has hinted at any concrete plans to challenge Khanna in 2026. If they did, defeating him would likely be a tall order—since his sophomore election in 2018, a primary challenger has never come within 30 points of unseating him.
But Khanna still felt the need to respond to the brooding tech royals. He noted that he has "supported a modest wealth tax since the day I ran in 2016," which prompted another angry retort from Casado, who accused the congressman of "antagonizing the people who made your district the amazing place it is" with a tax on billionaires.
Khanna hit back at his critics with a lengthy defense of not just the wealth tax, but his conception of what he calls "pro-innovation progressivism."
"My district is $18 trillion, nearly one-third of the US stock market in a 50-mile radius. We have five companies with a market cap over $1 trillion," Khanna said. "If I can stand up for a billionaire tax, this is not a hard position for 434 other [House] members or 100 senators."
"The seminal innovation in tech is done by thousands, often with public funds," Khanna continued. "Yes, we need entrepreneurs to commercialize disruptive innovation... But the idea that they would not start companies to make billions, or take advantage of an innovation cluster, if there is a 1-2% tax on their staggering wealth defies common sense and economic theory."
"We cannot have a nation with extreme concentration of wealth in a few places, but where 70% of Americans believe the American dream is dead and healthcare, childcare, housing, education is unaffordable," he concluded. "What will stifle American innovation, what will make us fall behind China, is if we see further political dysfunction and social unrest, if we fail to cultivate the talent in every American and in every city and town... So, yes, a billionaire tax is good for American innovation, which depends on a strong and thriving American democracy."
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Warnings of AI Bubble Grow Louder as Big Investors Dump Nvidia Stock
"I’m very nervous about the size of these investments in these data centers," one tech CEO said.
Nov 18, 2025
Tech industry insiders are growing more wary of a financial bubble in the artificial intelligence industry that many analysts have been warning could tip the global economy into a severe recession.
Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google parent company Alphabet, said in an interview with BBC published Tuesday that he believes the speculation currently pumping up investment in AI is akin to the kind of speculation that occurred in the late 1990s ahead of the dot-com stock crash.
"We can look back at the internet right now," he told BBC. "There was clearly a lot of excess investment, but none of us would question whether the internet was profound. I expect AI to be the same. So I think it's both rational and there are elements of irrationality through a moment like this."
PIchai said that he believed his firm would be well positioned to weather the bursting of an AI bubble, although he also cautioned that "I think no company is going to be immune, including us," were such a scenario to occur.
Sebastian Siemiatkowski, CEO of global payments network Klarna, told the Financial Times on Monday that while he still believed in the potential of AI, he also thought many of the biggest players in tech were vastly overspending to build out infrastructure that would not be needed to power the technology.
Siemiatkowski pointed to advances made this year by Chinese AI firm DeepSeek in vastly reducing the power needed to run AI as evidence that the energy-devouring data centers being constructed across the US would be a massive overbuild.
"I think OpenAI can be very successful as a company but at the same time I’m very nervous about the size of these investments in these data centers,” he said. "That’s the particular thing that I am concerned about."
Some major investors are also signaling that the boom may be over for AI.
MarketWatch reported on Monday that Palantir chairman Peter Thiel's hedge fund, Thiel Macro LLC, dropped all its shares in Nvidia, the US-based semiconductor giant that manufactures most of the chips used to power AI. The move by Thiel was revealed just one week after Japanese investment holding company SoftBank disclosed that it had divested its entire $5.8 billion stake in Nvidia.
Nvidia has also become a target for investor Michael Burry, who famously made a fortune by short-selling the US housing market ahead of the 2008 financial crisis, and who recently revealed that his firm was making bets against Nvidia and Palantir.
Concerns about a potential AI bubble have roiled global markets this week, and all major US stock indexes once again traded lower on Tuesday, marking the fourth consecutive losing session.
According to the Wall Street Journal, the current selloff is being driven by investors spooked about "lofty valuations and a pile-up of debt to build data centers," and the paper pointed to a new survey showing that "45% of fund managers see an AI bubble as the top 'tail risk' for markets" right now.
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'Crisis of Elite Impunity': New Emails Show Jeffrey Epstein Scandal About More Than Just Trump
"The wealthy and powerful operate with a set of rules totally unrecognizable to the rest of us."
Nov 13, 2025
Although Democrats in the US House of Representatives have used newly unearthed emails from the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein as a cudgel against President Donald Trump, many observers have noted that the full trove of messages also implicates multiple members of the American ruling class as complicit in a criminal conspiracy.
In particular, the emails reveal that Epstein maintained friendly ties with several people with enormous influence in US politics even after he served a prison sentence for soliciting a minor.
Among the prominent elites who maintained contact with Epstein were Larry Summers, former president of Harvard University and director of the National Economic Council under President Barack Obama; right-wing billionaire Peter Thiel, whose financing helped launch Vice President JD Vance's political career; right-wing podcaster and former Trump administration official Steve Bannon; and Kathryn Ruemmler, former Obama White House counsel and current attorney for investment banking giant Goldman Sachs.
Writing on Bluesky, political scientist Ed Burmila argued that the true scandal surrounding Epstein isn't just about one person, but a "crisis of elite impunity" in which the rich and powerful will brush off the crimes committed by their peers, even if they involve the serial sexual abuse of underage girls.
"The crisis of elite impunity that is ruining our society cannot be more clearly or convincingly demonstrated than with the fact that all of these people wrote all this stuff into an email and hit send," he said. "Some of these people are lawyers; the rest are intimately (phrasing) familiar with courtrooms and lawyers in their professional lives. They didn't put this stuff in writing because they're naive or ignorant; they did it because they have no fear of consequences. None at all."
Burmila's argument was echoed by commentator David Kurtz, who wrote at Talking Points Memo that reading the Epstein emails left him "astonished not so much by the chumminess he enjoyed with elites even after he’d served time for soliciting prostitution with a minor but by their flagrantness, their casual disregard, and their indifference to consequence."
Kurtz argued that this level of ruling-class impunity symptomatic of the deep rot inside American political, legal, and academic institutions.
"It is the same impunity that got us Trump," he wrote. "Like Epstein, Trump built a career on a transactional chumminess, mutual self-indulgence, and an alarmingly high tolerance level for misbehavior by the layers of political, business, media, and cultural elites surrounding him."
Leah Greenberg, co-director of Indivisible, shared Kurtz's essay on her Bluesky account and declared the Epstein scandal "a story about total elite impunity, how the wealthy and powerful operate with a set of rules totally unrecognizable to the rest of us."
MSNBC host Chris Hayes also thought the Epstein emails showed American elites in an unflattering light, and he observed on Bluesky that many of Epstein's correspondents showered him with "fawning and flattery," even though he comes across as "a pompous, sub-literate lech."
"Lots of people say: that’s because he’s blackmailing them, but I don’t think he’s blackmailing Kathy Ruemmler!" Hayes wrote. "I don’t think that’s what explains it. I think the banal answer is: he’s very rich and powerful and good at networking and this is how people act around very rich and powerful people."
Although Epstein was only ever criminally convicted on one charge of soliciting a minor in 2008, he was subsequently indicted in 2019 on charges of engaging in a broad sex-trafficking conspiracy involving dozens of teenage girls. Epstein would die in prison before he could face trial for these charges, and law enforcement officials would subsequently claim that he took his own life.
Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein's longtime accomplice, is currently serving a 20-year prison sentence for her role in helping Epstein groom and abuse underage victims.
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