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% 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.
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% of the money he made in 2025 alone) only underscores the scope of the crisis. 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.
Igor Volsky is the campaign director for Tax the Greedy Billionaires.
