For most of his career, Sergey Brin kept his distance from politics. He once dismissed government as a "giant bonfire of partisanship." A one-time donor to Barack Obama, the Google co-founder described Donald Trump's 2016 election as "deeply offensive" to him as an immigrant. A decade later, Brin has moved closer to the Republican Party, donated to Steve Hilton's campaign for California governor and joined the Trump White House's tech council.
Now, Brin is taking a more direct role in politics. He has committed more than $100 million to defeat a California ballot measure that would impose a one-time tax on billionaires' wealth, making him the largest individual donor to a ballot-measure campaign in state history. A tax on billionaires' fortunes has been a signature idea of Senator Bernie Sanders, the Vermont independent, since his 2020 presidential campaign.
He has called Proposition 40 the "most important ballot measure in America." The campaign comes after Brin changed his residency to Nevada, where his representatives now say he lives. In December 2025, the Google co-founder registered to vote there, according to state records reported by Forbes. He had bought a $42 million home on the Nevada side of Lake Tahoe.
The target is Proposition 40, which is not a long-term wealth tax like the one Sanders and some other progressives have long championed. Instead, this measure would impose a one-time, 5 percent tax on the wealth of billionaires who lived in California on January 1, 2026. Bloomberg estimated the measure could cost Brin about $13 billion.
His Nevada voter registration came three weeks before the cutoff. Brin's spending has coincided with a tightening race, with recent polls showing the tax measure's once-comfortable lead narrowing to a statistical tie less than two weeks before the November 3 election. The fight has divided California Democrats, with Governor Gavin Newsom opposing a measure backed by others in his party.
It has also turned the vote into a national test of whether a wealth tax can pass in one of the country's most Democratic states. Supporters argue the campaign has beaten the odds before. "A handful of the most controversial billionaires in the state and their consultants spread misinformation and rumors that Prop 40 wouldn't make the ballot – it did," Suzanne Jimenez, chief of staff of Fwest and the measure's lead sponsor, said in a statement to Newsweek.
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