It’s a peculiar kind of argument – one billionaire telling another billionaire that they really should be paying more in taxes. Not in a sotto voce, between-courses, isn’t-that-interesting way. But publicly, loudly, in op-eds and ballot campaigns and congressional testimony, with the kind of conviction that tends to make other billionaires visibly uncomfortable at dinner.
That argument is getting louder. From California ballot initiatives to the halls of Congress, a growing faction of the ultra-wealthy has decided the old playbook – lobby against taxes, park assets offshore, let lawyers work out the rest – is both morally indefensible and, at the scale wealth has now reached, genuinely dangerous. They are not waiting for the public to make this case. They are making it themselves, and they are making it to their peers.
It would be easy to write this off as performance. Rich people saying the right things in public while quietly arranging things otherwise. But the policy proposals being backed by some of these voices are real, with dollar amounts attached, deadlines approaching, and ballot boxes opening in November.
The Numbers Behind the Noise
To understand why this moment feels different, you need to know what the numbers actually look like right now.
A March 2026 report from Fortune found that in the third quarter of 2025, the top 1% of U.S. households owned 31.7% of all U.S. wealth – roughly as much as the bottom 90% combined, the widest that gap has been since the Federal Reserve started collecting data in 1989. That isn’t a trend that began yesterday. But the speed of it has accelerated in ways that are now impossible to ignore even for the people benefiting most from it.
By early 2026, U.S. billionaire wealth had surged to $8.1 trillion – and the country’s top 15 billionaires saw their collective fortune grow from $2.4 trillion to $3.2 trillion in a single year, more than double the S&P 500’s 16% return over the same period.
Peter Mallouk, the CEO of Creative Planning, a wealth management firm overseeing around $700 billion in assets, called this trajectory “100% completely unsustainable as a society.” Ray Dalio, the billionaire founder of Bridgewater Associates, warned that the widening wealth gap was causing populism to rise and risked creating “irreconcilable differences” that democratic order would not be equipped to handle. Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce, has also pushed for higher corporate taxes to fund education and housing. These aren’t economists or activists. They are people with serious skin in the current system, and they are worried about where it goes.
The tax situation that underlies all of this is equally stark. A 2025 study from UC Berkeley economists, published through the National Bureau of Economic Research, found that the Forbes 400 paid an average effective tax rate of just 24% of their true economic income between 2018 and 2020, compared to 30% for the overall U.S. population. The reason is structural: most billionaire wealth sits in assets – stocks, private businesses – that only get taxed when sold. Since most billionaires rarely need to sell, much of their growing fortune never gets taxed at all.
The Patriotic Millionaires and the State-Level Push
Into this gap has stepped an unlikely constituency. Chuck Collins, one of the founders of Patriotic Millionaires – a Washington, D.C.-based organization of high-net-worth individuals advocating for tax reform – describes what’s happening right now as a movement. “Part of it stems from the failure to address this situation at the federal level,” Collins said. “We just gave the top 1 percent in all the states a massive tax reduction. It’s a good time to make the case that wealthy, higher-income households should pay a bit more.” That includes Collins himself and others in the group, who describe themselves as high-net-worth individuals who believe they should be paying more.
Collins inherited his own fortune through his great-grandfather’s processed meat company, Oscar Mayer. He is not an outsider to wealth. He is someone who grew up inside it, and whose conclusion – after decades of watching the numbers – is that the current arrangement is unstable. The Patriotic Millionaires put it plainly on their own website: “Wealthy Americans like us have rigged the tax codes to give ourselves countless handouts, leaving working people paying higher rates than billionaires.”
The group has been backing wealth tax efforts at the state level with unusual energy. Washington State is not the first to pass a millionaire tax, and it won’t be the last. Massachusetts has had a millionaire surcharge in place since 2023, California may be voting to tax billionaires this fall, and at least a half-dozen other states are actively considering ways to tax the ultra-wealthy.
The Massachusetts example is instructive, and it cuts against one of the most reliable objections. Since Massachusetts’ 4% surcharge on annual taxable income above $1 million took effect in 2023, the state has collected nearly $6 billion in additional tax revenue – and the number of millionaires in the state has grown, not shrunk. The rich, it turns out, did not flee. Tax flight among the ultra-wealthy is, according to Collins and the data, largely a myth.
California’s Billionaire Tax: The Biggest Bet Yet
The boldest proposal in this moment is sitting on California’s November 2026 ballot. The 2026 California Billionaire Tax initiative – formally the One-Time Wealth Tax for State-Funded Health Care Programs Initiative – is a combined constitutional amendment and state statute that would require the state’s billionaires to pay a one-time 5% tax on their accumulated wealth to fund health care programs, food assistance, and public education. The initiative was sponsored by SEIU United Healthcare Workers West, which submitted 1.55 million signatures on April 27 to qualify it for the November vote.
The eligibility cutoff was January 1, 2026, meaning billionaires who still held California residence after that date would be subject to the tax if it passes. Six of the state’s estimated 214 billionaires claim to have left California before the deadline, including PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel, former Uber CEO Travis Kalanick, and Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Whether that’s a principled stand or a tax-driven relocation is a matter of some debate. The California Legislative Analyst’s Office found the wealth tax was likely to temporarily increase revenue by up to tens of billions of dollars – but also found the tax would decrease income tax revenue by hundreds of millions of dollars or more annually, due to some billionaires deciding to leave the state. And yet, two people who would be directly subject to this tax if it passes are among its most vocal supporters.
Tom Steyer, one of the leading candidates for California governor, is a billionaire who accumulated his estimated $2.4 billion fortune as a Wall Street investor and hedge fund manager. He has pushed for the ultrawealthy like himself to pay more in taxes, writing publicly in support of the proposal.
California Governor Gavin Newsom has vocally opposed the tax, telling Politico that the proposal “makes no sense” and is “really damaging to the state.” A number of Democratic candidates hoping to succeed Newsom have also opposed the tax, including former U.S. representative Katie Porter, former U.S. secretary of health and human services Xavier Becerra, former Los Angeles mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, and San Jose mayor Matt Mahan. The politics of this don’t map onto familiar partisan lines, which is part of what makes it genuinely interesting.
The Federal Push
While states move, Congress is also making noise – though the chances of federal action in the current climate are considerably thinner. In March 2026, Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Ro Khanna introduced the Make Billionaires Pay Their Fair Share Act, a bill that would establish a 5% annual wealth tax on the 938 billionaires in America, who are collectively worth $8.2 trillion. In its first year, the bill would provide a $3,000 direct payment to every adult in a household earning $150,000 or less, and use the estimated $4.4 trillion in revenue raised over the next decade to address housing, healthcare, and food assistance.
Under the bill, Elon Musk – worth $833 billion and now wealthier than the bottom 53% of American households combined – would owe $42 billion in taxes. Mark Zuckerberg, worth $220 billion, would owe $11 billion. Jeff Bezos, at $218 billion, would face a similar bill. Those figures are designed to be concrete rather than abstract. A number you can look at and react to.
Separately, in the same month, Senator Elizabeth Warren and Representative Pramila Jayapal led over 45 lawmakers in reintroducing the Ultra-Millionaire Tax Act, a wealth tax on fortunes above $50 million that a new analysis estimates would generate $6.2 trillion in revenue over the next decade – more than double what it was projected to raise when first introduced five years ago.
Morris Pearl, Chair of Patriotic Millionaires, put his group’s support in notably direct terms: “Millionaires like me want less inequality because we and our families will be better off in a society with less economic disparity.” He added: “I’m not any more altruistic than the next person. I’m just greedy for a different kind of country than some other rich people in America. I’m willing to pay more in taxes if it means helping us become the kind of country I know we can be.”
What the Public Actually Thinks
This is the part that sometimes gets lost in coverage focused on billionaires talking to other billionaires: the vast majority of ordinary Americans have held a consistent view on this for years.
A 2025 survey by the Pew Research Center of more than 5,000 U.S. adults found that roughly 63% of American adults said taxes on large businesses and corporations should be raised, including 34% who supported raising them “a lot.” A majority of U.S. adults also said they were bothered “a lot” by the feeling that some corporations (61%) and some wealthy people (60%) don’t pay their fair share.
That view crosses party lines more than political coverage tends to suggest. Among conservative Republicans, about a third favored raising taxes on corporations or high-income earners. But at least half of moderate and liberal Republicans expressed support for higher taxes on corporations and high-income earners.
This is the context in which billionaires publicly advocating for their own taxation make strategic sense, if not always comfortable sense. When the public already wants this, and when other wealthy voices are giving it cover, the political calculus shifts. The question stops being “can you pass this?” and starts being “what’s the actual obstacle?”
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The Quiet Part
The obstacle, of course, is money. Not a shortage of it – there’s clearly no shortage – but the way existing wealth translates into legislative influence. The billionaires lobbying against these proposals vastly outnumber those lobbying for them. The ones who want things to change are, by any measure, a minority within a minority.
And the objections raised against wealth taxes are not all cynical. They are real. Most European countries have repealed wealth taxes due to limited revenue and significant administrative and compliance challenges. Valuing private business assets is genuinely difficult. Wealthy people do have more mobility than middle-income families, and some will move. The California Legislative Analyst’s Office found that some billionaires deciding to leave the state would reduce annual income tax revenue by hundreds of millions of dollars even if the one-time tax raises tens of billions. These are not imaginary problems.
But neither is the alternative. The numbers don’t stabilize on their own. When the collective wealth of roughly 935 billionaires reaches $8.1 trillion while millions of Americans are skipping medical care because they can’t afford it, something is shifting structurally in how economies distribute their gains – and it doesn’t shift back without intervention.
What’s unusual about this moment isn’t that wealthy people are being asked to pay more. That argument has been made for decades. What’s unusual is that some of the loudest people making it are sitting on the other side of the table, not across it. Billionaires telling other billionaires to stop being so precious about this. To look at what the numbers actually say. To consider that a society running this hot on inequality eventually stops being one anyone – rich or otherwise – would choose to live in.
That may or may not move anyone in November. But it’s a harder argument to dismiss when the people making it have the most to lose.
AI Disclaimer: This article was created with the assistance of AI tools and reviewed by a human editor.