The bogus “innovation” rhetoric from Californian billionaires Sacks and Khosla is so thin, it isn’t even a cover. It’s a form of disinformation. What they describe is elites performing harsh extraction.
Larry Page is officially moving business out of California ahead of a proposed billionaire’s tax
This is some late 1800s boondoggle language by robber barons. They swindle. They cheat. They hornswoggle. All that heated rhetoric just to take as much as they can and avoid giving.
Stanford, the actual man who founded the school, literally took huge government payments for services and goods he never delivered. His name is best associated with fraud, racism and genocide. Perhaps, so much hidden for so long, that we should not be surprised to see ongoing atrocious behavior from the graduates of Stanford.
Google launched on public funding out of Stanford, built on the back of Yahoo—also launched out of Stanford. A university built with huge land grants and public research funding was the genesis. The early search algorithm was developed under a federal taxpayer grant from the NSF. The internet itself was a taxpayer funded DARPA project. California’s public university system, its roads filled with Google buses and Waymo cabs, its courts that enforce contracts and intellectual property—all of it is the substrate that made Google possible. Without taxpayer funding, Silicon Valley, let alone Google, would not have existed.
And the response to being asked for a measly 5% tax to keep the system running is to flee to a state specifically structured as a shelter for robber barons—one whose entire political system has become a preferred destination for Russian blood capital.
Related: Feb 2025 press release about DOJ conviction of elites laundering Russian money through Sunny Isles properties. Florida, it’s where elite money extraction schemes run to hide.
It was not “I disagree with this policy and here’s my counter-proposal.”
Just: no, I don’t share, I grab and run to where the sun don’t shine.
Five percent as public benefit? Five percent to give back to those he has taken so much from, and to help the next Larry Page?
If it were about policy disagreement or preferring a different state’s governance, you’d see some alternative contribution. Instead it’s pure negation: I will pay into no system of representation I don’t control, or into any democratic institution of law, anywhere.
Florida gains nothing because there’s nothing to gain. No state income tax, no wealth tax. Page isn’t relocating his tax burden to a different American community. He’s eliminating it, hiding like an imperialist baron trying to delay the fall of his empire by amassing wealth into a walled island.
Imperialism framing is a precise fit. It’s the same pattern: extract value from a territory, externalize costs onto that territory’s population, use legal structures to ensure the profits flow elsewhere. The only difference is they’re doing it to their own country rather than colonies—though the distinction blurs when you consider which communities bear the costs of underfunded schools and infrastructure. The racial geography of Silicon Valley wealth is not accidental; Palo Alto was built on restrictive covenants, and tech money has only accelerated the displacement patterns that followed.
Page fleeing California to avoid paying taxes is just the individual-scale version of this logic. His entitlement is breathtaking evidence of mental gymnastics and cruelty. He registers $156 billion in accumulated value and the response to a small public contribution—like what he benefited from—is to run like a Victorian drunk refusing to pay the bar tab because “do you know who I am.”
The question isn’t what Google elites pay, it’s what they’d pay without their long-term anti-social cheat-the-system architectures. These people who’ve captured massive value from a hedge on top of public infrastructure, from publicly educated workforces, and from public legal frameworks are cruelly engineering their affairs to contribute back as little as possible to those foundational systems, or nothing at all.
The structure was predation defined: intellectual property licensed to a Dutch subsidiary, which paid royalties to an Irish holding company, which was tax-resident in Bermuda. Profits generated by American engineers, using American infrastructure, research funded by DARPA, educated at public universities, all routed through tiny island shells to avoid contributing back any of it.
What’s next, seasteading for Lebensraum or to colonize Mars and revert humanity to strongman fantasy zones of zero laws, just for one guy’s latest whimsy? Slavery next?
Google intentionally paid an effective rate in the single digits on foreign earnings for years despite a statutory US corporate rate of 35%. The “Double Irish” closing didn’t end the game, just shifted it to different structures. The proposed single digit 5% wealth tax on Page’s $156 billion comes to roughly $7.8 billion. Not much. Would you give an $8 tip on a $160 meal? Imagine being asked for 5%, a whopping 30 point discount under the statutory corporate rate, and then running for the door rather than pay your unsalaried uninsured waiter even a cent.
There’s also the irony that tech elites constantly lobby for H-1B visas, importing workers educated at other countries’ public expense, while refusing to fund the domestic systems that educated their founders. Pulling up the ladder after climbing it is toxic, and very typical of American elites.
Page claims he’s escaping to freedom, but he’s actually building his own cage of misery. His island-buying will never be liberation, only isolation and exile. The man with $156 billion ends up scared and guarding his rock like a tin-pot dictator because he couldn’t bear to participate in real freedom.
A German citizen named Franciszek Honiok has been recorded as the first victim of World War II. He sold farm machinery and had openly sympathized with Poland. For this the Gestapo picked him up August 30, 1939, dressed him in a Polish uniform, gave him a lethal injection, shot him dead, and left him at the Gleiwitz radio station as “evidence” of Polish aggression against Germany.