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peter thiel
Newsom Ripped as Billionaire 'Errand Boy' for Opposing Wealth Tax on California Plutocrats
"Gavin Newsom wants a future for the Democratic Party that consists of sucking up to conservative billionaires," said one progressive critic. "That's a path destined for losses."
Jan 13, 2026
California Gov. Gavin Newsom vowed Monday to stop a proposed tax on the state's richest people, drawing condemnation from progressives who argue that the expected 2028 presidential hopeful's literal and figurative friendship with billionaires has no place in a Democratic Party that must center working class people and issues to win.
Last month, the Service Employees International Union—United Healthcare Workers West (SEIU-UHW) led the introduction of the California Billionaire Tax Act (CBTA), a state ballot initiative that would impose a one-time 5% tax on the wealth of roughly 200 billionaires "to protect healthcare, keep hospitals and emergency rooms open, and prevent millions of Californians from losing coverage" amid historic cuts to social safety programs by congressional Republicans and the Trump administration.
Supporters are currently collecting the 900,000 signatures needed for the CBTA to qualify for California's 2026 ballot. Meanwhile, billionaires including venture capitalist Peter Thiel and Google co-founder Sergey Brin are among those fighting the proposal.
Public opinion polling in recent years has shown that around three-quarters of all California voters, and over 9 in 10 Democrats, back a billionaire wealth tax. So do unions, social and economic justice groups, progressive economists, and congressional lawmakers including Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.)—another possible presidential aspirant whose support for the CBTA incensed Thiel and other Silicon Valley billionaires like Larry Page and Elon Musk.
However, Newsom finds himself aligned with Thiel—a seven-figure supporter of President Donald Trump's presidential campaigns—in opposing the proposed tax.
“This will be defeated—there’s no question in my mind,” Newsom said of the CBTA in a Tuesday interview with the New York Times. “I’ll do what I have to do to protect the state."
Two headlines preview the 2028 Democratic presidential primary -- and perfectly reflect the big divide inside the Democratic Party. On one side are those fighting billionaires, on the other side are those who are owned by billionaires.
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— David Sirota (@davidsirota.com) January 13, 2026 at 6:45 AM
Newsom—who has close personal, business, or political ties with billionaires including the Getty family, GAP co-founder Doris Fisher, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, and Siebel Systems co-founder and cousin-by-marriage Tom Siebel—said he is against the CBTA because it could stifle California's world-leading technological innovation and drive away businesses and wealthy individuals.
"The impacts are very real—not just substantive economic impacts in terms of the revenue, but start-ups, the indirect impacts of … people questioning long term-commitments," Newsom told Politico Monday. “That’s not what we need right now, at a time of so much uncertainty."
Not all plutocrats oppose a billionaire wealth tax. Benioff, Warren Buffet, Abigail Disney, Bill Gates, Jensen Huang, Chris Hughes, and George Soros have all advocated higher taxes on the ultrarich.
Huang, CEO of tech titan Nvidia and one of the 10 richest people on the planet, said last week that he is "perfectly fine" with the CBTA.
Gavin Newsom has terrible political instincts. Cozying up to racists like Charlie Kirk. Attacking trans kids. Defending billionaires. When left to his own devices he always picks the wrong path.
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— Oliver Willis (@owillis.bsky.social) January 13, 2026 at 4:53 AM
Responding to Newsom's opposition to the CBTA, Progressive Mass political director Jonathan Cohn said on Bluesky: "Gavin Newsom wants a future for the Democratic Party that consists of sucking up to conservative billionaires. That's a path destined for losses."
Civil rights attorney and professor Alejandra Caraballo also took to Bluesky, writing, "Another reason I'm never Newsom. He's a billionaires' errand boy beholden to them."
Progressive organizer Jonathan Rosenblum asked on X, "Which side are you on?"
"Gavin Newsom is on the side of the billionaires, not the millions of working people who stand to lose healthcare because of the Trump cuts," Rosenblum added. "Shamefully typical of the Democratic establishment."
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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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