Palmer Luckey won't leave California over wealth tax

Luckey has been a California billionaire since age 21, when he sold his first company, Oculus VR, to Facebook for $2 billion in 2014; his current company, defense-tech firm Anduril, is headquartered in Costa Mesa, not far from where he grew up in Long Beach, and was last valued at $61 billion. Speaking at an invite-only press conference Monday, Luckey said the proposed ballot measure — which would tax the net worth of California’s richest residents — “is going to cause a lot of problems” and push away people and companies he works with, but that he intends to stay and fight it: “I am staying. I think California is something special. I want to fight for California.”

He acknowledged pressure from fellow billionaires to declare he’d leave in protest. “This has been a point of friction between me and some of my other billionaire friends,” he said, paraphrasing their argument that staying “shows them there’s no consequences.” Luckey said he empathizes but won’t go along with it “right now because I still believe that we can fix things.” His objection isn’t to paying taxes generally, he said, but to the measure’s sponsor — a unit of United Healthcare Workers — and how the money would be used; the measure’s backers say proceeds would fund “health care, education, and food assistance” programs, naming Medi-Cal specifically. He also took issue with how the measure would value assets, including unrealized and illiquid wealth, with penalties reaching as high as 40%, and especially with a provision — per the Tax Foundation — that would tax someone with voting control as if they owned at least that share of a company, even if their actual ownership stake is smaller; the measure’s drafters say this reading is mistaken, arguing super-voting shares are valued differently as publicly traded assets.

Luckey said the voting-control provision hits him directly: he’s diluted his own ownership by raising money and giving employees equity, but kept outsized voting rights so that when employees sell shares to cover expenses like home loans, voting control stays inside the company rather than passing to outsiders. Those voting rights are also tied to his residency and leadership: “My voting rights only stick as long as I’m an American citizen living in America, running Anduril.” By his own estimate, he could owe around 5% of Anduril’s $61 billion valuation — roughly $3 billion — on that asset alone. He contrasted his position with Google co-founder Larry Page, who did leave California and still holds 27% voting control of Alphabet, now valued at just under $4 trillion.

“I’m hoping that this doesn’t pass,” Luckey said. “I’m hoping if it does pass, that there are legal challenges” — arguing the measure amounts to retroactively seizing past and future wealth and taxing control of a company rather than ownership of it.

Why it matters

Luckey’s stance tests whether California can keep its highest-profile tech and defense founders in place even as it moves to tax them more aggressively, and the voting-control provision he’s fighting could reshape how founders everywhere structure control versus ownership.