The moving trucks are lining up, and this time the people climbing into them are some of the richest in the country. A fresh wave of California tech millionaires is preparing to flee Gavin Newsom’s high-tax state for Florida, and the brokers and city officials waiting to receive them say their phones are already ringing off the hook, according to the New York Post.
The trigger is money — a lot of it. SpaceX’s blockbuster IPO on June 12 vaulted the company’s valuation above $2 trillion, made Elon Musk the world’s first trillionaire, and minted an estimated 4,400 new millionaires among its employees overnight. With OpenAI’s confidential IPO filing close behind, a generation of newly liquid tech founders is suddenly staring at the biggest paydays of their lives — and at California’s tax bill.
“The California area codes have already started showing up. It’s just that the conversations are evolving,” Jenni Morejon, CEO and president of the Fort Lauderdale Downtown Development Authority, told Fox News. “The wealth doesn’t hide here… and I really think what we’re seeing now with AI founders, with the era of liquidity, with SpaceX, is a generation that’s used to speed and being very public.”
The math is not subtle. California carries the highest state-level sales tax in the nation and a top income tax rate of 13.3% on individuals earning more than $1 million. Florida has no state income tax and no capital gains tax at all. For a founder about to realize tens of millions in a single liquidity event, the difference between the two states is measured in eight figures.
“There is going to be this transitional event with the IPO where executives are finally gonna see probably the biggest cash day most of them have ever seen in their lives. And many of them are not making millions, they’re making tens of millions overnight,” said Joe DaGrosa, chair of DaGrosa Capital Partners. “I think that’s going to have them thinking long and hard about South Florida and Miami.”
The trend is already well underway at the very top. Google co-founder Larry Page dropped $188 million on two Miami homes in December. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg followed with a $170 million Miami mansion in March. Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos had already pulled up stakes in the Golden State to protect their fortunes. Now the next tier down — the engineers and executives who just got rich — appears ready to follow them out the door.
And rather than reckon with why its highest earners keep leaving, Sacramento is preparing to give them one more reason to go: a proposed one-time 5% levy on the state’s billionaires is set to appear on the November ballot. It is a policy that reads less like a budget fix than a going-away present — the kind of message that turns a trickle of departures into a stampede.
For all of Newsom’s talk of California as the future, the people building that future are increasingly buying one-way tickets east. The area codes showing up in Fort Lauderdale tell the story Sacramento won’t.
Source: nypost.com
