Written by Josh Ishimatsu, Deputy Director of Strategy
Elon Musk, who “moved out” of California in 2020 and now officially lives in Texas, is a poster boy for California’s homeless billionaires problem.
Photo Credit: Reuters
Slightly tongue-in-cheek (but still also serious). California’s homeless billionaires are the real problem.
Words are tricky. Sometimes they do such a good job of capturing exactly what we want to say and sometimes they hide meaning, sometimes they deceive (intentionally and unintentionally), sometimes they say more about us than we want them to.
“Homeless” is a tricky word. In the 90s, Jewel had a song (Who Will Save Your Soul?) where she talked about “another tower going up where the homeless had their homes” which, in an artistic way, gets to the heart of the trickiness of the word homeless – what, even, is the meaning of the word home? And who gets to decide whether or not you have a home? This ambiguity/underlying value judgments/power imbalances are why some have migrated to the term “unhoused,” to be more precise in the description of who we’re talking about.
But for this column, I want to revive and repurpose the term homeless and talk about the real California/Silicon Valley homelessness problem. And here, I’m not talking about people who are unhoused. I’m talking about people who are very much housed. You could even say that they are the overhoused.
Here, I’m thinking about people like Sergei Brin, billionaires who have “fled” the state in advance of a potential billionaire’s tax initiative. People who are rootless, who have houses and houses and condos and beach houses, who live in so many different places that they don’t have a home anywhere. Heartless mercenaries who choose their primary place of residence based on tax codes. These people – and the systems that enable them – are a problem.
Silicon valley – with our special sauce of culture, environment, proximity to skilled and educated workforces, access to capital – made these people wealthy beyond imagination. And yet they feel no loyalty to us, to this place.
If you love a place – whether your family has been here for generations or whether you got here just yesterday – you put down roots. Home is an act of commitment. It is an act of love. You join communities, you act in community. Your connections are deeper than which way the wind blows. If a place really is your home, you work to make it better. You don’t leave at the first sign of a headwind.
This speaks to the extreme injustice of our homelessness problem. People who love this place, who have truly made this place their home, are being forced out because they can no longer afford to live here. And we – the everyday, regular, extraordinary people who work hard to make this place a better place, who struggle everyday to remain here – can no longer afford to live here. We are being uprooted, in large part, because of the ways in which these ingrate billionaires have distorted our housing markets.
I am being a little unfair to billionaires. The majority of billionaires (as stated in the NY Times article about Sergei Brin linked above) are NOT moving out of California, despite the potential of a billionaire’s tax. Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, is quoted “We chose to live in Silicon Valley and whatever taxes they would like to apply, so be it.” So it is not precisely a billionaire problem – we should uplift and appreciate the billionaires who have truly made this place their home. The problem, instead, is about homeless billionaires.
And this homelessness is not just a Silicon Valley problem (though it is a disproportionately big problem here). In LA, for example, homeless billionaires are supposedly fleeing the city because the sales of their mansions are being taxed at a slightly higher rate than in other places.
But the thing is, most of these people aren’t really leaving California. Their businesses and investments are still here. Hollywood and Silicon Valley still rule our economy and our culture. Homeless billionaires will still attend parties and functions and events here. California is still a place to see and be seen. And even if they sell one or more of their houses here, I’m sure most of them are and will continue to be property owners here. They will still stay in one of their properties when they are here for business and/or pleasure. These are paper moves from shallow people. These are loophole seekers – floppers, in sports parlance – who seek to keep taking advantage of our State’s creativity and innovation without giving anything back. Vampires.
California is my home. Silicon Valley is my home. And I will continue to fight for California and for Silicon Valley to be a home to all who want to call it home. Which is why I am personally supporting the California Billionaire Tax Act to help end billionaire homelessness in California.