California is well known for driving its productive citizens to other states.
A proposed new ‘billionaire tax,’ that’s coming up on the November ballot has already driven many of its most successful citizens — Peter Thiel, Sergey Brin, Larry Page, Mark Zuckerberg, Stephen Spielberg — to other states like Florida, Tennessee, Texas, Nevada, any place where the greedy hand of the state is not fixing to take another dip into their pockets.
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The Wall Street Journal last week noticed something weird: A lot of them are moving to nearby Nevada … and they’re seemingly losing money by buying up properties around Lake Tahoe at inflated prices.
According to the Journal:
As wealthy Californians flee the state, deep-pocketed buyers are taking refuge in Nevada, which is starting to rival Florida as a tax haven for the elite. Amid surging demand for prime Tahoe property in Nevada, a recent string of megadeals reflects the premium buyers are willing to pay for a lower tax bill—and the widening price gap between the two sides of the lake.California’s proposed wealth tax effectively “sprinkled rocket fuel” on the ultraluxury market on the Nevada side of Lake Tahoe, said Bill Dietz of Tahoe Luxury Properties.
The proposal would levy a one-time, 5% tax on the net worth of residents with net assets of $1 billion or more, and would apply to anyone who resided in California as of Jan. 1, 2026.
In December 2025, just after the tax was proposed, Google co-founder Sergey Brin paid $42 million for a lakefront home in Crystal Bay, Nev., property records show. The same month, a 210-acre estate in Zephyr Cove, Nev., sold for $80 million to an undisclosed buyer. Then in March, an entity tied to venture capitalist Steve Jurvetson shattered the Nevada and Tahoe records with the $125 million purchase of an estate in Incline Village, Nev. Jurvetson also picked up an adjacent $7 million property, and paid $46 million for a separate Incline Village home, for a total spend of $178 million. Brin didn’t respond to requests for comment. Jurveston declined to comment.
Then came the kicker from the Journal:
Ironically, the wealthiest Nevada home buyers may be saving money on their taxes, but they could be paying at least twice as much for real estate. In the Tahoe area, Nevada homes typically carry a roughly 20% premium over similar California properties, Dietz said, and the delta is far wider for the priciest homes. “A $20 million property on the California side will be $40 million to $50 million on the Nevada side, that’s how dramatic the spread is,” he said.
I used to cover billionaires for the Forbes list, and learned that all billionaires pay attention to their fortunes, don’t like to lose money, and always calculate the ratios and odds in various deals and scenarios. There’s no question the billionaires knew they’d be paying more for Nevada-side Tahoe property.
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Obviously, they’ve judged that a better deal than staying in California, where the odds of California’s ruling Democrats leaving billionaires alone after taking ‘their’ five percent were pretty unlikely. Wealth isn’t just a matter of money sitting in a pile, it’s a matter of intentions and investments, what is invested to provide returns in the future. That seems to be what’s operational here, not merely the cash in the checkbook as California’s lawmakers seem to ‘think.’
Democrats go to the tax-the-billionaire well again and again as they mouth claptrap about ‘affordability’ and they certainly have no intention at stopping with billionaires. Anyone who owns a home, no matter how humble, is a millionaire, after all, with Democrat policies that create inflated property values and yes, they will be coming for people with those homes as greedy millionaires. Meanwhile, the billionaires won’t stand a chance in the face of that kind of greed from government that will continue so long as Democrats hold power. Who wants to wait around to be the next harvest.
By contrast, the Tahoe property looks cheap. What’s more, unlike taxes, property is an investment they get to keep — they can sell it, rent it, make money off it if they like, or just kick back and enjoy it.
So yes, they got a good deal by paying those premiums, even if some quoted by the Journal think they are losing money. Sometimes it’s worth it to lose money for peace of mind — the certainty that California’s lawmakers won’t take a thwack at their piñata is clearly worth paying a premium for.
And the fact that this is happening tells a lot about just how bad California’s governance is, which, augmented by election fraud, is probably impossible to change for the foreseeable future.
So adios, idiots, the billionaires have better places to go, and they’re happy to pay a premium to do it.
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Image: Pixabay, via Picryl // CC0 1.0 universal public domain