Why Sergey Brin spent $100 million fighting California's billionaire tax

“You’re a billionaire and I can’t afford to buy a house, is that fair? Well, I’m a billionaire that worked for 22 hours a day at one time. Did you work 22 hours a day?” - John Caudwell, $4.2 billion net worth

If you ever wondered why Sergey Brin has spent $100 million trying to block the billionaire tax in California, that video is the answer. That guy was John Caudwell, a founder with a $4.2 billion net worth who uses his money for fun little everyday activities like - building a statue of himself and maintaining a superyacht called Titania. This British billionaire actually thinks that he worked 12,000 times harder than you to deserve being worth 12,000 times more than the average British citizen.

But it’s ok guys, he works 22 hours a day and you work 7 seconds.

The reason John Caudwell’s mentality is relevant is that you have to understand that billionaires legitimately think that they deserve this level of wealth off the backs of their own hard work and NOTHING else. Sergey Brin spent $100 million to block the billionaire wealth tax in California, with the same psychotic mentality. It’s theirs, and they deserve to have it while millions of Americans can’t even afford basic necessities like food and gas.

I touched on this a lot when I talked about the problems with this kind of privilege. You become disconnected from reality. That simple reality is NO ONE becomes this wealthy through their own hard work. It is 10,000s of individual people who build the companies that result in those billionaires becoming worth what they are, and yet? The ownership structure does NOT reflect that reality.

Sergey Brin owns 3% of Google. Google is a $3.9 trillion company. At a certain point, we have to ask if how these companies structure their ownership is actually representative of who is putting in the labor to get them to that point.

That’s why Cadre, our company, has a completely democratized structure that still factors in early risks, but gives out ownership proportional to peoples’ hours worked divided by the total number of hours by all contributors. There is no such thing as a founder at our company - it’s an employee collective who all contribute and decide on how we should build things.

A lot of people think we are insane. And my response is that, NO, business as usual and what it has done to this country is what is INSANE.

Anyways, if you want to make Sergey Brin actually pay his fair share in taxes, you can Vote YES on Prop 40 and NO on Props 41 and 42. 41 and 42 have been put on the ballot by billionaires to confuse people and block the billionaire tax.

And I’ll leave you with a thought by a billionaire who ACTUALLY seems to get it. Here’s Jensen Huang, the founder of Nvidia, explaining why he thinks he should pay these taxes.