Billionaires started pulling an estimated $1 trillion in assets out of California — and Ro Khanna responded by going on CNBC to defend the tax that triggered it.
Now he wants you to believe Trump is the problem.
Rep. Ro Khanna sat down on CNBC's Squawk Box Tuesday and told America exactly why California is struggling – and somehow left out every decision he personally made.
Billionaires Are Leaving California and Khanna Is Blaming Trump
Khanna told the Squawk Box audience that "the ultimate thing that's hurting California" is Trump restricting immigration, Trump's tariffs, and 10,000 PhDs leaving the federal government.
He wants to fix all of it with a billionaire tax on Jensen Huang and Sundar Pichai.
What he didn't mention: an estimated $1 trillion in assets left California before the billionaire tax even passed.
Google co-founder Larry Page shifted his business affairs to Delaware, Texas, and Florida.
His co-founder Sergey Brin quietly wound down or moved more than a dozen California business entities in the final weeks of 2025.
Peter Thiel opened a new office for Thiel Capital in Miami on December 31, 2025.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg purchased property in Florida.
Journalist Mike Solana reported that 20 of 21 billionaires he spoke with said they are preparing to leave the state or have already taken concrete steps to do so.
https://twitter.com/JDunlap1974/status/2041844389450793218?s=20
Together, that group represents an estimated $1.3 trillion in net worth and more than 50,000 jobs.
They weren't fleeing tariffs.
They were fleeing Ro Khanna and his billionaire tax.
California Wealth Tax Is Already Costing the State More Than It Will Ever Raise
California already has the highest top personal income tax rate in the country at 13.3% and one of the highest top corporate tax rates at 8.84%.
The Tax Foundation ranks California 49th in its Business Tax Climate Index.
According to the Public Policy Institute of California, 3% of all businesses relocated out of the state in 2025.
California's unemployment rate has sat above 5% for more than 19 consecutive months – the first sustained payroll job decline since the pandemic.
San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan put it plainly: the top 1% already account for 40 to 50 percent of California's income tax revenue.
When they leave, working people pick up the tab.
Now Khanna wants to layer a new 5% one-time tax on top of all of it – applied retroactively to January 1, 2026, so billionaires can't escape it even if they already left.
The tax would apply not just to cash in the bank but to business equity, securities, art, and intellectual property.
A founder sitting on $2 million in liquid assets but $100 billion in company stock would owe $5 billion.
Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan called it a confiscation of 50% of Larry Page and Sergey Brin's Alphabet shares.
The Hoover Institution calculated that the tax would collect roughly $40 billion while costing California an estimated $65 billion in lost income tax revenue – a net loss of $25 billion.
https://twitter.com/ThomasSowell/status/2030726495551819944?s=20
Even California Governor Gavin Newsom – not exactly a conservative firebrand – said he is "adamantly" against it.
California Built a Golden Goose and Voted to Carve It Up
Nine of twelve European countries that implemented wealth taxes over the past thirty years abandoned them – because capital left, tax revenues fell, and working people paid the price.
Khanna knows this.
He knows because after his initial endorsement of the billionaire tax sparked a firestorm in Silicon Valley, he started reaching out to tech leaders like Netflix co-founder Reed Hastings and LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman to negotiate "commonsense workarounds."
He tried to organize a summit at Stanford University to broker a compromise between labor unions and the billionaires they're trying to tax.
That is not the behavior of someone who believes his own argument that Jensen Huang would still build Nvidia in a state that hands it a billion-dollar tax bill.
https://twitter.com/BloombergTV/status/2035642686305104182?s=20
What Khanna told CNBC Tuesday morning is what Democrats tell themselves when the consequences of their own policies arrive on schedule.
Blame Trump. Blame tariffs. Blame the immigration system.
Anything but the tax code they wrote, the regulations they passed, and the billionaire levy they championed on national television.
California didn't lose $1 trillion in assets because of tariff policy.
It lost $1 trillion in assets because Ro Khanna went on Squawk Box to talk about how billionaires need to pay a little more so people can have childcare – and the billionaires believed him.
Your kids and grandkids who stay in California will pay the price for every job, every company, and every dollar that just loaded up a truck and headed for Texas.
Khanna won't. He'll be on CNBC again next month blaming someone else.
Sources:
- Fox News, "Tech insider warns California tax hikes will trigger mass billionaire exit," Fox News Digital, January 9, 2026.
- "Billionaires flee California as proposed wealth tax sparks high-stakes exodus," YNet News, February 18, 2026.
- "California Wealth Tax Is Pushing People Out of the State," Americans for Tax Reform, January 15, 2026.
- "2025 Exodus Out of California Continues," WEHOonline, January 5, 2026.
- "California's 'billionaire tax' will be 'disastrous' and cause wealthy to flee, economist predicts," Fox Business, February 6, 2026.
- "California's Proposed Billionaire Tax Will Cost the State an Estimated $25 Billion, Hoover Study Finds," Hoover Institution, March 5, 2026.
- Ro Khanna, Squawk Box, CNBC, April 7, 2026, via Breitbart News.
