Google co-founder Sergey Brin is spending $57 million to defeat a proposed billionaire tax in California. “I fled socialism with my family in 1979 and know the devastating, oppressive society it created in the Soviet Union,” he explained. “I don’t want California to end up in the same place.”
Months before it collapsed, my family and I also fled the Soviet Union. But that experience led me to support both the 5 percent tax on California billionaires and a national wealth tax. We need to reduce the power that billionaires like Brin have over our economy and democracy.
There’s nothing “Soviet” about a small, one-time tax on billionaires to offset cuts to healthcare and education in Republicans’ “Big Beautiful Bill” — cuts that are already impacting hospitals and emergency rooms nationwide.
The tax does not nationalize industry, abolish private property, or send dissidents to gulags. To intentionally conflate it with the Soviet system insults the memory of the people who actually suffered under it.
What I learned watching the Soviet Union crumble is that societies fall apart when a tiny elite captures political and economic power, walls itself off from ordinary life, and uses that power to entrench its own privilege. The USSR didn’t fall because it taxed the ultra-wealthy. It fell because a tiny group of insiders rigged every system imaginable to protect their own status.
Historians and critics have a name for the Soviet ruling class: the nomenklatura. It consisted of a network of roughly 3 million people, less than 1.5 percent of the population, who held the commanding heights of the Party, the ministries, the state enterprises, and the security services.
They enjoyed their own stores, their own hospitals, and their own rules — which fostered deep resentment among the Soviet population. When the system finally cracked, that resentment was one major reason.
Now look around the United States in 2026.
Approximately 300,000 households with over $50 million in wealth (the top 0.1 percent of the population) are sitting on $40 trillion. That’s more than the national debt and several times what the federal government spent last year.
The fact that Brin can drop $57 million to kill a ballot measure he doesn’t like and barely notice the expense (this represents less than 0.1 percent of the money he made in 2025 alone) only underscores the scope of the crisis. He can fly a candidate for governor on a private jet to his Lake Tahoe home and decide, over dinner, whether to bless the campaign with a $1 million check.
And he can mobilize his wealthy friends to spend millions to defeat a tax that most voters support. A March 2026 nationwide survey by Impact Research found that 77 percent of registered voters nationwide support raising taxes on billionaires, including 91 percent of Democrats, 75 percent of independents, and even 65 percent of Republicans.
Majorities believe billionaires have a negative impact on corruption, political division, the cost of housing, the cost of living, the cost of healthcare, and the spread of online misinformation.
Brin is spending millions to avoid a 5 percent tax from a fortune estimated at $273 billion. Should he be subject to the tax, he would still be worth roughly $260 billion. The revenue raised from the proposal would prevent up to 3.4 million Californians from losing their healthcare coverage — and keep hospitals and emergency rooms open for citizens across the state.
Both in the former Soviet Union and in the United States today, the walled-off world of extreme wealth breeds its own paranoia — in which any policy aimed at the common good gets misread as a personal attack.
Taxing extreme wealth in order to reduce the influence of a tiny, ultra-rich elite isn’t how democracies fall. It’s how they survive. Across the nation, our leaders must find the courage to do so.
