Gavin Newsom’s California has just been dealt yet another crushing blow, as Uber co-founder Travis Kalanick has packed up and left for the Lone Star state.
Lawmakers are pushing to crush wealthy business owners, and they honestly thought these people would open up their checkbooks rather than flee.
It turns out, Elon Musk was way ahead of the curve on this one.
Elon Musk saw what was happening in California more than five years ago and decided to leave.
In December 2020, Fox News reported that Musk was leaving California and relocating his business to Texas.
Musk pulled no punches in discussing his move, stating, “You have a forest of redwoods and the little trees can’t grow. California has been winning for a long time, and I think they’re taking it for granted."
He also predicted that the influence Silicon Valley flexed in the tech business would soon take a hit. And we he was right.
Let’s fast forward to the current day, and Californians are finally realizing that you cannot squeeze the people who create the jobs, or they will go elsewhere.
Last week, the New York Post reported that a poll was taken regarding the billionaire tax that is being promoted, and residents were extremely concerned that hitting billionaires with a 5% tax for the right to live in California would send them running.
A whopping 64% were worried about the mass exodus, and nearly 60% were worried about how this would impact the state in the future in terms of lost tax revenue.
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) continued to promote the tax, but it is easy for him to do so because it is not his state. Oddly enough, you don’t see Bernie calling for the rich people in his state to get clobbered, but he has no problem talking about California and New York.
Over the last few weeks, we have been hearing about numerous billionaires leaving the state rather than being forced to pay the extra taxes, with the latest being Kalanick, according to the New York Post.
Kalanick is worth $3.6 billion, so you can now add that money to Musk, Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, PayPal and Palantir investor Peter Thiel, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, and Meta chief Mark Zuckerberg, all of whom have gone or are planning to go to Florida or Texas.
California still boasts the most billionaires in the country, but many of the biggest have left, and there are surely more to follow.
This is what happens when you have a governor who is obsessed with criticizing the bad orange man on every TV show, radio show, and podcast he can find, rather than governing his state. But everything is fine in California, according to Newsom. It would be nice if just once someone would call him out during these interviews rather than allowing him to rant uncontrollably about Donald Trump.
