Like fans of a football team that’s already out of the game in the first half, people and corporate entities in tax-and-regulation crazy California have decided to head for the exits while the getting is good.
Once again, the pattern is familiar: raise taxes in California, and watch the private jets head east.
Mark Zuckerberg may soon be adding Miami to his ever-growing list of luxury addresses. According to people familiar with his plans, the Meta founder and his wife, Priscilla Chan, are exploring a home on Indian Creek Island—an ultra-exclusive, heavily guarded neighborhood often called “Billionaire Bunker”, according to Bloomberg.
The tiny island is already packed with famous residents, including Jeff Bezos, Tom Brady, Jared Kushner, and Ivanka Trump.
With an estimated fortune north of $200 billion, Zuckerberg already owns multiple properties across California, Hawaii, Washington, D.C., and near Lake Tahoe. It’s not clear whether Florida would replace any of those homes or just become another stop on his real estate tour.
But the timing is telling. Bloomberg writes that California is considering a new wealth tax aimed at billionaires, including taxes on unrealized gains. The proposal has rattled investors and helped push several tech leaders out of the state. When Democratic policies start biting, it seems many billionaires suddenly “fall in love” with Florida.
Chamath Palihapitiya wrote on X: “With Zuck’s move to Florida, California’s total taxable wealth from billionaires has plummeted to well under $1T from over $2T just a few weeks ago. The loss of this tax revenue was totally avoidable but is now forever. All because Gavin Newsom stood motionless as this stupidly written bill, from a fringe union and a handful of socialist academics with an axe to grind, meandered its way into the public conversation without any action from him and freaked everyone out.”
“These were all people that were paying 13%+ in state income tax every year WITH NO COMPLAINTS UNTIL A FEW WEEKS AGO. And now, for the rest of time, the lost tax revenues from these folks will have to be paid for by the middle class because they are the only group left in California large enough that you can tax to fill the hole.”
The most expensive condo sale in the Las Vegas area closed in early January for $21 million. If the sale of the 5,000-square-foot penthouse about 15 miles from the Las Vegas Strip had closed just a little more than a week earlier, it potentially could have saved the buyer a few hundred million dollars.
“He was looking for a while, and at the last minute, there was a little bit of a hiccup,” real estate agent Ivan Sher told Business Insider of the sale. “He was actually even under contract significantly before then.”
That “he” is billionaire Don Hankey, the chairman of Hankey Group and a lifelong Californian worth a reported $8.2 billion.
Hankey is one of a handful of Californians who have decided leave the state due to the proposed Billionaire Tax Act — a bill that would subject California residents worth more than $1 billion to a one-time tax worth 5% of their assets. For someone like Hankey, that’s about $410 million.
“I just felt a little bit like I wasn’t wanted,” Hankey told Forbes of why he chose to leave California.
Sher, who repped Hankey’s $21 million penthouse sale on both sides as the founder of real estate agency IS Luxury, said that while Las Vegas’ luxury market was already heating up, the news out of California kicked it into a higher gear.
“If people were to ask me what percentage of my buyers were from California, I’d say probably about 25%, and then for the first few years after COVID, that number was closer to 80%,” Sher said. “As soon as that billionaire tax was proposed, the exodus began again — but at a much higher level.”
The Las Vegas metropolitan area had about 331 millionaire households in 2019, according to RentCafe data. In 2023, that number jumped 166% to 879 households.
Natalia Harris has been selling ultra-luxury real estate in the Las Vegas area for the last five years. In that time, she said the definition of “ultra-luxury” has changed in the Silver State.
“Back then, a home that was $10 million was ‘Wow’ for Vegas — that was at the top of the price point,” Harris told Business Insider. “Now we have three new listings that we just brought to market last week that are all between $11 million and $20 million.”
Zain Aziz, the founder of technology firm Atom and one of Harris’ high-net-worth clients, moved to the Las Vegas suburb of Henderson, Nevada, in 2025. He said leaving the high taxes and hectic lifestyle of Silicon Valley behind was bittersweet.
“You don’t really want to get punished if you do good and you create more jobs,” Aziz said. “I believe the Las Vegas Valley has become more and more what’s synonymous with what California used to be — which was free-spirited and ‘Come and achieve the impossible,'” he added.
Aziz isn’t the only one taking his assets elsewhere. Google cofounder Sergey Brin recently spent $42 million on a Lake Tahoe home on the Nevada side, according to Bloomberg. Larry Page, Google’s other cofounder, found a tax haven on the East Coast, buying two properties totaling about $173 million in South Florida.
Billionaire Larry Ellison, who owns homes across the country and the world, bought a handful of properties in Lake Tahoe near the California-Nevada border. He also recently sold his San Francisco home for $45 million in the largest sale in the area in 2025, according to the San Francisco Standard.
Yesterday, the Seattle Seahawks beat the New England Patriots in Super Bowl LX at Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara, California.
From a financial perspective, each Seahawks player will take home $178,000—payment for that particular game.
Now, given that the Superbowl was played in California—and the players earned money playing in the game— it’s reasonable for the state of California to tax that specific income.
Disagree. Sounds like taxation without representation to me.
But that’s not the way California looks at it.
Instead, the state will go back in time, all the way to the start of the NFL season in September, and take their ‘fair share’ of the players’ ENTIRE salaries over the entire season.
Sam Darnold just WON the Super Bowl…and LOST $71k because it was in California…
This is what’s known as the state’s “jock tax,” in which they tax non-resident professional athletes based on the number of “duty days” they spend in the state—traveling, practicing, attending meetings, or playing in a game.
Both teams arrived in California last Sunday, so each player will log at least eight duty days in the state just for the Super Bowl.
They then divide those California duty days over the entire season, and you end up with a percentage. If a player spends, say, 7% of his duty days in California over the season, then the state claims the right to tax 7% of his entire annual salary— at California’s top marginal rate of 13.3%!
This is pretty crazy given that the players only earned $178,000 for that game.
But in the case of Seattle quarterback Sam Darnold, he’ll end up owing Gavin Newsom roughly $249,000 in state taxes this year.
In other words, Sam Darnold will LOSE over $70,000.
California’s already sky-high gas prices are expected to surge after Valero abruptly shuttered its Benicia refinery amid a spiraling “oil crisis,” a new report claims.
The Benicia refinery began shutting down on Saturday, four months earlier than planned, a former Valero manager told the California Globe Tuesday.
Thermal imaging showed the facility went cold as the Crimson Pipeline – which transports crude oil from Southern to Northern California – was also taken offline.
“We are in an unprecedented oil crisis,” oil expert Mike Ariza told the publication.
Valero Energy Corp. announced its plans last spring to pull the plug on its 145,000-barrel-per-day refinery by April, a move that is expected to send fuel prices skyrocketing and hobble the state’s refining capacity.
Refineries are fleeing the Golden State as regulations drive operating costs 26 to 37% higher than the national average. Chevron moved its operations from the Bay Area to Texas, while Phillips 66 powered down its 140,000-barrel-per-day Los Angeles refinery in October.
Ariza warned that as refineries go dark, more Californians will also skip town, noting that the oil and gas industry supports 536,770 jobs and pumps $338 billion into the state’s economy, the outlet reported.
He said Valero’s accelerated shutdown comes after the company scrapped its crude oil contracts back in October.
“Now, Valero is not even seeking to try and sell the refinery,” Ariza told the outlet in December.
“Even after the state tried to convince Valero to remain open, they elected to shut down. And instead of shutting down in April, they shutdown in January. All due to the state’s egregious regulations and unprecedented unjustified fines.”
Democrat-run California never saw a golden goose it didn’t want to kill.