Jesse Proudman has spent 28 years in Washington state. He started his first company at 13, built two more after that, and now runs Venice.ai, a privacy-focused generative AI platform based in Seattle. He is 41 years old, and he says he is done.
In an interview with Fox News Digital, Proudman said he is actively scouting locations outside the state, Nevada, Texas, Austin, Nashville, Florida, because Washington's tax climate and political culture have turned against the people who build businesses there.
His blunt assessment of the situation: everyone he knows with the means to leave is already packing.
"The reality is everybody that I know that has means to leave has either left or is in the process of leaving. They've listed their homes, they're shopping elsewhere."
The trigger, Proudman told Fox News Digital, was Washington's new "millionaires tax", the state's first-ever income tax. Democrats in the legislature passed it in March, and Democratic Gov. Bob Ferguson signed it into law on March 30. State Sen. Jamie Pedersen sponsored the measure.
Proudman did not mince words about where he believes the tax is headed. He said the millionaire threshold is a political starting point, not a finishing line.
"They're beginning with millionaires because that's an easier place to sell it. It's obvious that they intend to apply this to everybody. He said he intends to apply it to everybody and, quite frankly, its implication is that Washington will become the highest tax state in the country."
The Wall Street Journal editorial board called the new tax a "con" that will "inevitably capture the middle class." The Tax Foundation noted that Seattle already carries the highest combined state and local sales tax rate in the country, at 10.35 percent. Layer an income tax on top of that, and the math starts to look punishing.
That pattern, progressive leaders passing new levies on the wealthy, only to expand them downward over time, is familiar to anyone who has watched California hemorrhage residents in recent years. Proudman drew the comparison himself.
"It's the same thing that happened in California with Elon Musk. Again, he went to Texas. Like, you're not wanted, you'll move to a climate where you are."
If Proudman expected sympathy from Seattle's political leadership, he was looking in the wrong place. Mayor Katie Wilson, described as a self-described democratic socialist, appeared at a Seattle University event on April 14 and laughed off the prospect of wealthy residents leaving the state.
"I think the claims that millionaires are going to leave our state are, like, super overblown. And if, the ones that leave, like, bye."
Fox News Digital reached out to both Wilson and Pedersen for comment but did not immediately receive responses.
Proudman took Wilson's dismissal personally, and professionally. He said the mayor's job is to build a vibrant city, not to tell the people who created jobs and companies that they are unwelcome.
"The mayor, whose job it is, is to build a vibrant city, is telling the people who have built companies here, who have created jobs in this city and this state that they're not wanted here."
That attitude, a shrug and a wave from elected officials as productive citizens head for the door, captures something larger than one city's tax fight. Los Angeles has led the nation in population loss as residents flee California's tax burden and rising crime. The dynamic repeats wherever progressive governance treats wealth creation as an offense rather than an asset.
Proudman described a city that changed around him. For two decades, he said, Seattle celebrated entrepreneurship. The startup community was supportive. The ecosystem worked.
"Seattle used to be a place where you were excited to build something, where it was celebrated, where you could imagine creating something from nothing and that you could manifest that. And, for many years, for probably 20 years, that was the culture here."
Then, over the last four or five years, something shifted. Proudman said entrepreneurship became "villainized." The culture that once nurtured startups turned adversarial.
"We had a vibrant startup community. We had a very supportive startup community. And the ecosystem worked. It helped build the companies. And then, for whatever reason, sort of over the last four or five years, we've seen this shift where entrepreneurship is now villainized. And it's an unfortunate and sad shift in what otherwise has been a phenomenal place to run businesses."
The places he is considering tell their own story. Nevada, Texas, Nashville, Florida, states where, as Proudman put it, "the business community is vibrant" and "the government is encouraging entrepreneurship."
"They're climates where the government is encouraging entrepreneurship, where they're welcoming people, and they're not villainizing those who have built something."
The contrast between blue-state tax policy and red-state competition for business is not abstract. Several blue states have refused to match tax relief measures embraced elsewhere, while Sun Belt states actively court the entrepreneurs and workers those policies push away.
Proudman's core argument is simple: people who can move, will move. The millionaires tax assumes the tax base will sit still and absorb whatever the legislature imposes. Proudman said that assumption is wrong.
"It doesn't make sense to continue to live here if you have mobility."
Whether Venice.ai has formally decided to relocate remains unclear. Proudman said he is "out looking for an alternative," which suggests the search is active but the decision is not final. What is clear is the direction of his thinking, and, he says, the thinking of many others in his position.
States like Nevada and Texas, which have positioned themselves as destinations for exactly this kind of economic migration, stand to gain. Nevada and Arizona have become focal points in the broader competition between low-tax and high-tax states for residents, businesses, and political influence.
Meanwhile, Seattle's political class appears content to let the experiment play out. The mayor laughed. The governor signed the bill. The sponsor, by Proudman's account, intends to expand it. And the entrepreneurs, the ones who built companies, hired workers, and paid into the local economy for decades, are shopping for moving trucks.
None of this is new. California pioneered the model: raise taxes on the wealthy, dismiss warnings about capital flight, watch the tax base erode, then raise taxes again on whoever remains. California's governance failures, from runaway spending to collapsing infrastructure projects, have become a cautionary tale that Washington's leaders seem determined to ignore.
Proudman's story is one man's account, and his claims about a mass exodus among Seattle's entrepreneurial class are his own characterization. But the policy facts are not in dispute. Washington passed its first income tax. The combined tax burden in Seattle is already the highest of its kind in the country. And the state's elected leaders are publicly mocking the people most likely to leave.
When a city's mayor tells its most productive residents "bye," she should not be surprised when they take her up on the offer.
