IMPLICATOR
- California voters installed the initiative in the state constitution to curb corporate domination of state government, above all the Southern Pacific Railroad. The instrument was a defense against private money writing public law. It is now Sergey Brin's primary weapon.
His vehicle is called "Building a Better California." Read the name twice. The man behind the checks no longer lives in California. He moved to a $42 million mansion on the Nevada side of Lake Tahoe before January 1, the residency cutoff for a proposed 5% wealth tax that would touch his roughly $270 billion Alphabet-linked fortune.
Call it "civic engagement." Better: call it absentee rule.
He measures Newsom's resolve. He also samples Sacramento's appetite for being taxed.
In 1910, the Southern Pacific Railroad ran California in everything but name. Three governors had been on its retainer; the legislature passed its bills; judges wrote opinions to order. Hiram Johnson campaigned on a single promise, eviction, and won. The 1911 constitutional amendments armed voters against captive government. The governing lesson was lapidary: a polity that cannot be governed from within is already being governed from without.
Brin captured the weapon Johnson built.
Louis Brandeis saw the shape of it in 1914. Other People's Money, his attack on the money trust, treats concentrated wealth and concentrated political power as the same fact filed under two headings. From that single claim, California is now relearning a few things the hard way. Concentrated money does not stop at influencing elections; in time it drafts them. Disclosure is sunlight, and sunlight without enforcement is decoration. The third lesson is structural and cuts deepest: a republic that lives off the patience of those it cannot tax has already mislaid what republics are for.
The treehouse and the Signal chat.
In a redwood treehouse north of San Francisco at Christmas, Brin and his partner Gerelyn Gilbert-Soto cornered Newsom in the cold and announced their departure. Within weeks Brin had moved to Lake Tahoe and seeded a Signal group chat with fellow titans about raising "hundreds of millions" to influence California politics. Twenty million dollars to Building a Better California within days. Thirty-seven million more by spring. Backing for Republican Steve Hilton and Democrat Matt Mahan, two gubernatorial candidates who oppose the tax in a state Brin no longer pays taxes in. Eric Schmidt, Patrick Collison, Michael Moritz, and Peter Thiel followed his lead.
The lone in-state billionaire arrayed against them, Tom Steyer, has spent $140 million of his own money on a Democratic primary campaign that borrows its slogan ("class traitor") from Bernie Sanders. By April, ultra-wealthy donors on both sides had pushed more than $270 million into the cycle. Sacramento's politics had become a billionaires' duel with healthcare workers as occasion.
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Defenders of the wealth tax carry their own interests; the SEIU local that drafted the measure represents 120,000 healthcare workers whose paychecks ride on the federal Medicaid arithmetic. The merits of the tax can be argued in the ordinary way. Brin's role cannot. A man who moved to Nevada to evade a ballot now bankrolls the ballot machinery built to overrule it. Johnson's prosthetic, aimed in 1911 at the Southern Pacific, has been repurposed by its wealthier successor. Signature-gatherers working for Brin-backed campaigns were paid up to $15 per valid signature, circulating in counties where the rural hospital may not survive the federal Medicaid cuts the tax was meant to backfill.
Hiram Johnson would have recognized the maneuver, if not the latitude: he assumed the threat to California's self-government came from a corporate office in San Francisco, never from a glass-walled funicular on the wrong shore of Lake Tahoe.
Marcus Schuler
Editor-in-Chief and founder of Implicator.ai. Former ARD correspondent and senior broadcast journalist with 10+ years covering tech. Writes daily briefings on policy and market developments. Based in San Francisco. E-mail: [email protected]
