The billionaire breakup: Larry Page flees California while Jensen Huang shrugs

In late December, as most Californians prepared for New Year's Eve, Larry Page's lawyers were filing paperwork. Lots of it. His family office, Koop, converted from California to Delaware. His flu research vehicle, Flu Lab LLC, did the same. So did One Aero, which funds his flying car ventures, and Dynatomics, his AI-focused aircraft manufacturing startup. The addresses scattered across Florida, Nevada, and Texas like a wealth manager's game of pin the tail on the tax haven.

A source close to Page confirmed to Business Insider what the filings suggested: the Google cofounder had already left the state.

Then there's Jensen Huang. At CES in Las Vegas, a Bloomberg reporter asked the Nvidia CEO about California's proposed wealth tax. Huang's answer landed like a slap: "I've got to tell you, I have not even thought about it once." You could almost hear Page's lawyers grinding their teeth.

The contrast feels staged. Two of technology's wealthiest men, both California fixtures, both staring down the same potential 5% levy. One spent the final weeks of 2025 dismantling decades of California ties. The other waved it off. "I'm perfectly fine with it."

The easy read: rich people quibbling over money. But the numbers don't support that. Page, worth an estimated $258 billion, faces a potential one-time tax bill north of $12 billion. Huang, at roughly $163 billion, would owe around $8 billion. Staggering sums. Neither man would notice the difference in his daily life. Yet Page treated the prospect like a house fire. Huang treated it like junk mail.

Something else is going on here. Two billionaires, forced to choose between money and something harder to name, made opposite calls.

The architecture of exit

Page's departure was methodical. The filings tell a story of careful preparation, each entity converted with its own new address, each jurisdiction selected for what it offers.

Delaware handles the secrecy. The state doesn't require LLCs to name their directors, which grants Page the obscurity his family office has always aggressively protected. Florida and Texas handle the math. Neither state taxes income, and both keep Sacramento's Franchise Tax Board at arm's length. That agency is famous for chasing former residents across state lines to claw back revenue.

Here's where timing mattered. California's proposed ballot measure, if it passes, would apply retroactively to anyone residing in the state as of January 1, 2026. Page's lawyers made their filings in late December. Days to spare. Somewhere in a quiet office, while the rest of California popped champagne, attorney Cristina Rosado signed conversion after conversion. Wayne Osborne, the CEO of Page's family office, had already been scouting Miami for months.

Even Page's wife's marine conservation charity, Oceankind, converted out of California to Delaware in December. Everything. All of it.

The comprehensiveness suggests this wasn't a reaction to a single tax proposal. Page had already purchased islands in Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, and Fiji through various LLCs. He bought those properties years before anyone floated a California wealth tax. The billionaire class has been building exit infrastructure for a long time. The tax proposal just gave them a reason to use it.

Page isn't alone in this. Peter Thiel signed a lease in December for Thiel Capital office space in Miami's Wynwood neighborhood. David Sacks, now Trump's AI and crypto czar, announced his venture firm Craft Ventures had opened an Austin office. He relocated personally. Chamath Palihapitiya posted about giving "serious consideration" to Texas. A Miami real estate agent told the New York Times he'd been contacted by five California billionaires planning to make Florida their home, specifically to dodge the tax.

The flight pattern is clear. The destinations are predictable. What's less clear is whether any of it will matter.

The math nobody wants to do

The proposed 2026 Billionaire Tax Act would impose a one-time 5% levy on California residents worth more than $1 billion. Backers at the Service Employees International Union-United Healthcare Workers West say it could raise $100 billion from roughly 200 billionaires. They need about 875,000 signatures to place it on the November ballot. The money is earmarked for healthcare and education, though that's almost beside the point.

If you're a billionaire reading those numbers, your reaction depends on which math scares you more.

The tax itself is simple arithmetic: 5% of your net worth, payable over five years. For Huang, that's roughly $8 billion spread across 60 months. Painful on paper. But Nvidia shares have appreciated more than $8 billion in value during individual trading sessions. The stock giveth.

California's math is where things get fragile. The state's Legislative Analyst's Office estimates the wealth tax would generate tens of billions in one-time payments. Same analysis notes that if billionaires leave, state income tax revenues drop by hundreds of millions annually. Not once. Every year. Forever. California already collects more than 40% of its personal income tax revenue from just 1% of taxpayers. The state budget is a Jenga tower balanced on the shoulders of people who can afford private jets.

Economists Joshua Rauh and Ryan Shyu studied what happened after California raised taxes on high earners in 2012. Their finding: the response "eroded 45.2 percent of state windfall tax revenues within the first year and 60.9 percent within 2 years." The wealthy didn't just complain. They left. Or they restructured their income until Sacramento couldn't touch it.

Governor Gavin Newsom gets this, which explains why a Democrat in an overwhelmingly Democratic state opposes the wealth tax. "You can't isolate yourself from the 49 others," he said at a New York Times DealBook Summit in December. "We're in a competitive environment. People have this simple luxury, particularly people of that status, they already have two or three homes outside the state."

Newsom started raising money to kill the measure. Ron Conway threw in $100,000 in November. Conway has been investing in Silicon Valley since before most current founders were born.

San Jose's mayor opposed the tax in early January. Matt Mahan is a Democrat, for what it's worth. His city sits at Silicon Valley's center. "We need a rising economic tide to lift all boats," he wrote on X, "not a political plan that will sink California's innovation economy."

So the governor opposes it. The mayor of the state's third-largest city opposes it. Both Democrats. This stopped being about left-versus-right somewhere around the second round of LLC filings.

Why Huang stays

Huang's indifference might be performance. Might be genuine. Might be something more calculated.

"We work in Silicon Valley because that's where the talent pool is," he told Bloomberg. When the interviewer noted that many tech executives were talking about the proposed tax, Huang cut him off: "Not really, not this person. This person's trying to build the future of AI."

Bravado, sure. But also truth. Nvidia doesn't manufacture its chips in California. TSMC handles that in Taiwan. What Nvidia does in Santa Clara is design. Design requires engineers, and the engineers capable of doing this work cluster in specific places. Trying to replicate that ecosystem in Austin or Miami would take years. Nvidia doesn't have years. The AI race is measured in quarters.

Huang also enjoys a public profile that Page has spent decades avoiding. He's the guy in the leather jacket doing keynotes at CES, not the guy buying islands under shell company names. Fleeing California over a tax would generate headlines. Staying and shrugging it off generates a different kind of headline. The kind that makes him look above the squabble.

There's also what Huang gains by staying. Nvidia has been cultivating its relationship with the Trump administration, navigating export controls on China, positioning itself as essential to American AI leadership. Looking like a tax refugee would undercut all of that.

Page has none of these constraints. No public role at Google since 2019. No interviews. No image to protect. The man can simply disappear, and that's exactly what he did.

The loyalty test

Nobody in Silicon Valley wanted to answer this question. The billionaire exodus forced it anyway. Who stays when staying actually costs something?

Ro Khanna endorsed the wealth tax. His district covers most of Silicon Valley, which made the blowback personal. Martin Casado, a partner at Andreessen Horowitz, posted that Khanna had done "a speed run alienating every moderate I know who has supported him." Donors started talking about funding a primary challenger. Vinod Khosla warned that "California will lose its most important taxpayers and net off much worse."

Khanna is now trying to thread an impossible needle. He says he supports "workarounds for startup founders whose companies are not profitable and who have illiquid stock." He's meeting with Netflix cofounder Reed Hastings and LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman to work out details. He's also proposing a bipartisan investigation into government fraud, apparently hoping to convince billionaires that their tax money won't disappear into Sacramento's budget.

The effort reeks of desperation, and there's a reason. The wealth tax proposal came from labor unions trying to offset expected federal healthcare cuts under Trump. It was designed to fill a budget hole. Nobody was thinking about how VCs would react.

But the people who would pay it were already thinking. Had been thinking for years. Page's island purchases, Thiel's Florida voter registration, Sacks's Austin office space. The infrastructure of departure was already in place. The tax proposal just provided cover to use it.

What California is betting

Say the measure qualifies. Say voters approve it. California would be betting that enough billionaires stay, that enough money keeps flowing, to cover the ones who bolt.

The union backing the tax refuses to blink. Suzanne Jimenez, the group's chief of staff, sounds defiant when she dismisses the exodus threats: "Decades of research show that tax-driven migration among the very wealthy is limited." She points to wealth taxes in Massachusetts and Washington that "raised billions for public priorities while high-income residents and their wealth have continued to grow." Translation: we've heard this bluff before.

But the comparison limps. Massachusetts taxes income, not wealth. Washington taxes capital gains, not total assets. Neither state has tried what California is proposing: a direct levy on net worth, including unrealized gains, applied to people who could establish residence on the moon if they wanted to.

The real question is whether California's advantages, the weather, the universities, the concentration of talent, can survive a 5% haircut. Huang seems to think so. Page's lawyers clearly don't.

Both might be right. Huang runs a company that needs proximity to a specific talent pool. Page runs a family office that needs proximity to nothing. Their different responses reflect their different constraints.

But they also reflect something about the men themselves. Huang, for all his billions, still thinks of himself as someone who builds things. That line about "the future of AI" wasn't just PR. It was identity. He's not a capital allocator optimizing for tax efficiency. He's an engineer who happens to be obscenely rich.

Page used to have that identity. Built Google in a Stanford dorm room. Revolutionized search. Reorganized Alphabet. Somewhere along the way, he became something else. A man whose lawyers file paperwork in late December to dodge a tax that might never pass on a ballot measure that might never qualify.

The islands. The shell companies. The family office wrapped in secrecy. Architecture of withdrawal, not creation. Page didn't leave California because the tax would ruin him. He left because staying meant showing up. Answering questions. Being Larry Page, California resident, subject to California's rules. He'd rather be Larry Page of nowhere in particular.

Civic duty has nothing to do with Huang's decision. Nvidia needs the engineers, and Silicon Valley has them. Huang also, let's be honest, enjoys the spotlight too much to slink off to Austin. The leather jacket. The keynotes. The adoring crowds at CES. You don't get that in Texas.

What's less clear is what California becomes when everyone who can leave, does. The state keeps its weather, its universities, its coastline. It keeps Jensen Huang, for now. It loses Larry Page, who was never really there anyway. Just his paperwork. Filed, and now withdrawn.

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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]