Larry Page has moved to Florida
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This thread showcases exactly why they do this: It is enough to simply slap the name "philanthropy" on something in order to have people thinking it is good and defending you. It is an effective PR stunt, which is why they all do it. Don't be the fool.
Do people often pretend that they're going to move? Seems like a weird thing to say.
they threaten to move to push legislation which way they want.
President Franklin D. Roosevelt
Address at Worcester, Massachusetts
October 21, 1936
It's always a bluff like a kid throwing a temper tantrum going to "hold their breath".
Page left California specifically because of the so-called "Billionaire Tax", and is taking with him his family (which will inherit his vast riches), his philanthropy, his non-profits, many jobs, taxes and more. The effect will be generations of lost benefits to California.
There is absolutely 0 reason that someone worth $270 billion needs to worry about the 5% tax. The 5% tax will reduce his estimated worth by $13.5B bringing him to a paltry $256.5B.
To put $256.5B in perspective: over two /lifetimes/, he would need to spend around $4.5MM a day to exhaust that number, assuming it did not grow exponentially over that same time.
2. If they do it once then why not again next year? Maybe next time it's for only $100 million or $10 million or $1 million. Eventually everyone is paying 5% of their wealth every year. Why not? That's how we got the current income tax.
3. It's the principle. Resisting these efforts sends a signal that they aren't a good idea.
4. Do we really think the money is better off in control of the incompetent CA government than invested in private enterprise or donated to charity? I don't see how it's better for it to line Newsom's Swiss bank account.
But his net worth has effectively more than doubled in 1y. I think he’ll be just fine.
How annual income should return more than that if he can do anything at all.
If there is $270B in equity invested, making those 5% back should be rather straightforward for someone with that much wealth, a decent wealth manager would recoup that easily. Money makes money.
> 2. If they do it once then why not again next year? Maybe next time it's for only $100 million or $10 million or $1 million. Eventually everyone is paying 5% of their wealth every year. Why not? That's how we got the current income tax.
This is just a slippery slope fallacy.
> 3. It's the principle. Resisting these efforts sends a signal that they aren't a good idea.
Exactly, it's blackmailing, sending a message "look what you've made me do" when the government attempts to reign in the ultrawealthy.
> 4. Do we really think the money is better off in control of the incompetent CA government than invested in private enterprise or donated to charity? I don't see how it's better for it to line Newsom's Swiss bank account.
With this argument you can defend never paying taxes to CA then, do you think it would be better as a complete anarco-capitalist state? It makes me sad that USA's public governance is so bad that this argument is always used to defend rich people not paying taxes; the political system is so absolutely broken that people prefer to allow ultrawealthy folks to keep hoarding even in the face of very real issues fracturing society stemming from that instead of thinking about how that money could fix many public issues.
Its his voter shares, he wont get them back. Larry and Sergei currently control 51% of Google votes, if they sell any more they lose control of Google so they can't afford to sell.
If it’s blackmailing, it’s blackmailing that is legal and extremely common. Similar events have occurred in multiple jurisdictions around the world whenever wealth taxes are attempted. The only way to prevent this in a country like the US that doesn’t allow retroactive taxation is to institute an exit tax, but this is also not legal at the state level in the US. Oh, and you also likely need capital controls, another no-no inside the US.
Capital flight is so historically common that there’s a common phrase to describe it. I have no idea why CA thought they were any different.
It isn't unheard of.
Adam Carolla has been threatening to move out of California for like at least a decade at this point.
- they move their official residence and happen to stay most of the time at the "totally just rented" place in the same state anyway
- or keep telling everyone how they're going to move, but don't actually do.
Because let's be honest - if there wasn't a big reason to live where they do, and it wasn't a pain to work from another state, they wouldn't be there to begin with. They're paying the higher taxes because they benefit(ed) in some way.
They also benefit from being famous and threatening to leave.
But if you are unfathomably rich, it's missing a lot of the culture/arts/schools/dining/tier 1 medical care/things to do of a big blue city like NYC/Bay Area/whatever. It's also culturally a place who already made their money elsewhere go to flaunt it. It's a very different vibe than places people work and grow wealth.
So a lot of the uber rich already have 5 homes, one of which is Florida, and they spend exactly enough days there, creating exactly enough of a paper trail to show Florida is their primary residence.
In practice it may just be adjustments around the edges to where they already spend time. Most only do this if they are childless, the kids are out of the house, or they are extremely divorced.. since it's disruptive to kids being in school.
My guess is you haven’t spent much time in Miami or Florida. It’s most definitely not just theme parks and beaches.
Sure there's stuff, but its like 1/10th the stuff
Friends who moved down ended up keeping their NYC doctors after being very unhappy with treatment, etc
1. Google itself isn't moving. I don't think Larry is closely involved anymore, and a move out of state seems to prove that.
2. How much tax revenue did California even make from him? If he doesn't sell stock, then he has no capital gains to tax. That's the whole point of the wealth tax. The ultra-wealthy are infamous for tax avoidance schemes such as rotating loans against their stock to avoid capital gains.
It's tough to slim down on spending. Be it individuals or governments and quasi-governmental organizations. Companies can swiftly implement spending cuts and RIFs --sometimes aggressively.
Governments, though, there are threads throughout --elected officials often trade support for positions and favoritism and if they take those away, so do many of their fiercest people who get out the vote. Also, their voters are averse to having the services they've grown accustomed to getting cut.
So sometimes you need that official who knows he or she is a one termer but will go in and cut and cut. People will hate them but it will allow the government a chance to make a turnaround.
It would be better if we mainly taxed consumption directly. If you are a billionaire but spend $100k/yr I am fine with you paying the same taxes as anyone else spending $100k/yr.
I believe that taxing people proportionally on income earned by labor is a unifying element of a social contract. i.e., we are all contributing to the common good. Income from capital is "free money." You didn't work for it; you took it from somebody else in the form of interest, dividends, or some other rent-seeking financial magic.
At some point, wealth becomes corrosive to society. People acquire it just for the sake of acquiring more and building their personal power. It seems that wealth is used to build more mechanisms of rent-seeking to further extract money from people who make their money through labor.
That kind of non-beneficial use of wealth, rent-seeking, and financial magic should be the target of any tax system before taxing money earned by labor.
Consumption taxes incentivize reducing waste and is pro environment. Isn't that what California is about?
>people acquire it just for the sake of acquiring more and building their personal power. It seems that wealth is used to build more mechanisms of rent-seeking to further extract money from people who make their money through labor.
So why are you a proponent of earned income taxes? Those hit people who make their money through labor. What you want is land value taxes, those hit people who make money through rent seeking (including tech companies whose assets sit on valuable land).
You can also reduce or eliminate the tax on essentials like groceries.
Wealthy progressives don’t like it because many of them hold a huge portion of their wealth in housing. They imagine that they can somehow fix inequality without fixing distortions in the housing market.
No one tax "solves" the problem. The problem, as I see it, is wealth hoarding beyond what any normal person would need to carry them through to the end of life. Instead of listing everything we should tax, maybe it'd be shorter to say that we look at what billionaires do to avoid taxes and close those loopholes. Then watching them again, and every time they come up with a new tax evasion strategy, fix it.
I wish I had the resources to develop an AI system that could find and document all instances of tax evasion by billionaires. But if I did that, I suspect I would need to be extra careful crossing streets, going near balconies, and reminding people that I'm not suicidal.
All wealth sits on land, and all land is already constantly appraised and subject to land value tax. It would be a trivial change to collect marginal land value tax rates using beneficial ownership.
As an additional benefit, the income tax return, which enables a ton of corruption at worst, and time waste at best, is gotten rid of.
But if you recognize some benefit based on their value, you absolutely should pay taxes on that value.
The class interest of the billionaire capitalist is the same as the class interest of the millionaire capitalist is the same as the class interest of the small business owner. Unless all of the capitalists leave, the capitalist class will still control the entire economy of California.
"After we'd been in England for several years, I asked the people who do our taxes to check, and they told me that I actually saved money by moving to England. That's how high California state taxes are already."
If you make under say $200-250k, you pay way way higher taxes in the UK. Above that, if you are in a high tax US city/state .. US total fed/state/local taxes start to pull well ahead at the $500k & $1M income levels.
Seems like a defect.
This just reinforces my opinion that we shouldn't listen to billionaires about anything.
Larry Page leaves California to protect $12.5B from proposed wealth tax
He can live anywhere he wants to and have residency anywhere he wants to. This sounds like “Larry can’t afford to live in Cali and is forced to “move” to Florida and never set foot in Cali ever again” He’ll move his mail and get FL Driver License and continue to chill in Cali (which he should have done decade ago
Also, worth keeping in mind how posts that are "unrelated to technology itself" could arguably trigger the hard-core contingent here. So, just like how Trump's or Elon's bloviations get flagged here, PG's posts could, in theory, also evoke the purest hacker mentality -- at scale.
Interpret it as you wish :)
Google co-founder Larry Page moved to Florida from California in early 2026, purchasing over $188 million in Miami property. He left California to avoid a proposed 5% state wealth tax targeting billionaires, shifting his primary residence and assets to Florida, which has no state income tax.
Makes sense to me. Several businesses and individuals from NYC have also moved to Florida for similar reasons. If I were hard working or creative as them to be as wealthy I would do the same and I know others here would too, they just wouldn't likely admit or say it. None of that prevents one from having a satellite office in the former state.
We as a society can barely get along with one another as this world gets more inter-connected and as more incompatible cultures are forced to mix with one another. There are too many conflicting and incompatible situations to fix before we can even get close to equality. That is the reality I can see. Perhaps if we divided ourselves up into a matrices of 512 or 1024 groups and each group populated a planet of their own then perhaps some of those planets could achieve the desired equality. Maybe. No idea how long it would last.
Even the sci-fi dream of Gene Roddenberry's totally equal future came with a lot of pain, wars, chaos and after all that there was still significant inequality and violence and this was from someone that was a staunch believe in all forms of equality. Even he had to keep it real enough or people would not be able to suspend disbelief yet still fictional enough to allow escapism.
I'm perfect fine not being as wealthy as Larry Page and having all the stress and drama that comes with it.
If you want to engage honestly, you can start by acknowledging that there is an enormous gap between believing that "record breaking wealth inequality is bad and causing societal problems" vs "no inequality should exist in any capacity."
If someone has a gazillion gazillion gazillion mega-bucks that does not harm me in any way shape or form. More power to them. I would be fine with them also collecting medicare and social security especially if they, like me, had to pay into social security their entire working life and could not opt out.
If we can hold out for machines like a holodeck then we can truly live any fantasy and that may be a nice form of escapism. No idea how long it will be for such machines to exist.
Brin paid more for his new home that his lifetime charity giving according to Forbes. https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbeswealthteam/2026/02/09/ame...
looks like he paid more for his new house that what Forbes thinks he's given to charity.
Reminder that the Republican policy for 40 years has been to 'starve the beast' and in other ways sabotage government programs so that exactly your argument can be presented. Prior to that intentional sabotage by Republicans and aligned political partisans against the United States we had much less fraudulent and wasteful government. When half of the politicians/oversite/management ACTIVELY wants government (and by extension the country) to fail and engage in policies intended to created failure in the government, it's hard to have effective government.
No I am a leave people alone that are not harming me. I am not envious and I am not a power tripper. If I want to help those in need then I will push my government to cut programs. Governments do not help those in need as they have no incentive to do so. They will pocket the money as they do every ... single ... damn ... time. This never changes and never will.
To paraphrase Don Draper - That's what the money is for! (to live the life you want)
But I think for many that make that much money is a scoreboard primarily, and they've given up any normalcy of a personal life so long ago to get it that they don't really know what to do with themselves once they have the money.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbeswealthteam/2026/02/09/ame...
Yours?
> normal societal expectation
Lol. Which society are you living in?
> Yours?
About $300. I'm not the one shaming people about their house costing more than their charity.
My lifetime giving is more than I paid for my current house. The house in discussion for him is just one of how many that he owns? Or how many boats that count as 'second homes' under tax rules? Also consider he has paid for the entirely of this house, the average person giving 5-10% hasn't come close to paying for their house, so you need to go based off the 'already paid' amount. Also their home would be their largest asset, so going by that his largest asset for comparison would be his stock holdings, an order of magnitude larger than the cost of one of his homes.
Old boy is a billionaire, not a rando, and has proven he has zero shame. Despite starting their companies with techno-optimist claims, the robber barons had more shame/were more decent people/supported society more than the average tech billionaire.