View / California’s billionaire tax is a referendum on the tech industry - Semafor

Putting California’s billionaire tax on the ballot, which was trailing in early results but remained too close to call Wednesday, may have felt like a crusade against the rich and powerful.

But the measure is also a referendum on the state’s homegrown tech industry, which is confronting an American public who no longer feels that technological advancement is always making their lives better.

For decades, tech has been the great forcing function in the American economy: creating competition, spurring growth, and propagating a talent base that drew the top workers from around the world. It benefited no economy more than California’s, which surpassed Japan to become the world’s fourth-largest economy.

But despite cool gadgets like smartphones and GPS systems, many Americans are now focused on social media’s impacts on children, anxiety over AI, and the political backlash toward data centers, which ran deep enough this election cycle to turn even the reliably red Texas statehouse blue.

If that’s the way Texas went, you can only imagine how Californians are feeling as they see a gigantic transfer of wealth to billionaires behind the Anthropic, OpenAI, and SpaceX IPOs, and question why the rest of the state isn’t sharing in the AI boom’s windfalls. Dinging California’s billionaires with a wealth tax feels pretty good to almost everyone.

But catharsis doesn’t necessarily improve people’s lives. And slowing down technological progress isn’t the answer, either. The only answer I can see is ensuring more Americans take part in the massive wealth gains that are going to happen in the coming decades. If the majority of Americans don’t share in the upside, they will see only downside. As we learned Tuesday, an angry populace will stand in the way of tech’s grand plans.