Larry Page has moved to Florida

https://twitter.com/paulg/status/2026737030257062253

by jmeister • 5 months ago

46 75 5 months ago

twitter.com

jackvalentine• 5 months ago

Oh no?

GenerWork• 5 months ago

"He wasn't just pretending to move to Florida."

Do people often pretend that they're going to move? Seems like a weird thing to say.

serf• 5 months ago

its a luxury of the ultra-rich.

they threaten to move to push legislation which way they want.

burnt-resistor• 5 months ago

A number of my friends who belong in these very high upper brackets have suggested to me, more in sorrow than in anger, that if I am reelected they will have to move to some other Nation because of high taxes here. I shall miss them very much but if they go they will soon come back. For a year or two of paying taxes in almost any other country in the world will make them yearn once more for the good old taxes of the U.S.A.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt

Address at Worcester, Massachusetts

October 21, 1936

It's always a bluff like a kid throwing a temper tantrum going to "hold their breath".

Alupis• 5 months ago

Every election you have celebrities and wealthy individuals threaten to leave the country, etc. Nearly none of them follow-through, and of the ones that do, many ultimately move back.

Page left California specifically because of the so-called "Billionaire Tax", and is taking with him his family (which will inherit his vast riches), his philanthropy, his non-profits, many jobs, taxes and more. The effect will be generations of lost benefits to California.

garciasn2• 5 months ago

Yeah; there's absolutely no way he could possibly support philanthropic efforts in one state from another. Nope; everyone now loses out because of it!

There is absolutely 0 reason that someone worth $270 billion needs to worry about the 5% tax. The 5% tax will reduce his estimated worth by $13.5B bringing him to a paltry $256.5B.

To put $256.5B in perspective: over two /lifetimes/, he would need to spend around $4.5MM a day to exhaust that number, assuming it did not grow exponentially over that same time.

georgemcbay2• 5 months ago

Do people often pretend that they're going to move?

It isn't unheard of.

Adam Carolla has been threatening to move out of California for like at least a decade at this point.

tkel4• 5 months ago

They threaten to do this every single time there is an election in NYC. And studies have shown that they are lying. To try and manipulate people. The rich are actually far less likely to move.

[1] https://fiscalpolicy.org/migration

viraptor2• 5 months ago

There are two pretend types:

- they move their official residence and happen to stay most of the time at the "totally just rented" place in the same state anyway

- or keep telling everyone how they're going to move, but don't actually do.

Because let's be honest - if there wasn't a big reason to live where they do, and it wasn't a pain to work from another state, they wouldn't be there to begin with. They're paying the higher taxes because they benefit(ed) in some way.

They also benefit from being famous and threatening to leave.

steveBK1234• 5 months ago

Yes.. Florida is fine, and the weather is even nice 3-6 months/year depending on your basis of comparison.

But if you are unfathomably rich, it's missing a lot of the culture/arts/schools/dining/tier 1 medical care/things to do of a big blue city like NYC/Bay Area/whatever. It's also culturally a place who already made their money elsewhere go to flaunt it. It's a very different vibe than places people work and grow wealth.

So a lot of the uber rich already have 5 homes, one of which is Florida, and they spend exactly enough days there, creating exactly enough of a paper trail to show Florida is their primary residence.

In practice it may just be adjustments around the edges to where they already spend time. Most only do this if they are childless, the kids are out of the house, or they are extremely divorced.. since it's disruptive to kids being in school.

kcplate• 5 months ago

it's missing a lot of the culture culture/arts/schools/dining/tier 1 medical care/things to do…

My guess is you haven’t spent much time in Miami or Florida. It’s most definitely not just theme parks and beaches.

kipukun• 5 months ago

This almost feels like satire.

Bender6• 5 months ago

From elsewhere:

Google co-founder Larry Page moved to Florida from California in early 2026, purchasing over $188 million in Miami property. He left California to avoid a proposed 5% state wealth tax targeting billionaires, shifting his primary residence and assets to Florida, which has no state income tax.

Makes sense to me. Several businesses and individuals from NYC have also moved to Florida for similar reasons. If I were hard working or creative as them to be as wealthy I would do the same and I know others here would too, they just wouldn't likely admit or say it. None of that prevents one from having a satellite office in the former state.

maddmann3• 5 months ago

Something needs to be done about the historic inequality in this country. It will undue all the “innovation” (ie selling ads and addicting people to the internet) that these tech billionaires have contributed.

Bender6• 5 months ago

Inequality will always be a thing. I am not saying it should be, just that it will be. Different people have different skill-sets, are in the right or wrong places at the right or wrong time, have different connections with people and a million other factors. Some are born with good RNG, some with a bad roll.

We as a society can barely get along with one another as this world gets more inter-connected and as more incompatible cultures are forced to mix with one another. There are too many conflicting and incompatible situations to fix before we can even get close to equality. That is the reality I can see. Perhaps if we divided ourselves up into a matrices of 512 or 1024 groups and each group populated a planet of their own then perhaps some of those planets could achieve the desired equality. Maybe. No idea how long it would last.

Even the sci-fi dream of Gene Roddenberry's totally equal future came with a lot of pain, wars, chaos and after all that there was still significant inequality and violence and this was from someone that was a staunch believe in all forms of equality. Even he had to keep it real enough or people would not be able to suspend disbelief yet still fictional enough to allow escapism.

I'm perfect fine not being as wealthy as Larry Page and having all the stress and drama that comes with it.

cgio2• 5 months ago

If I were as wealthy as them I would not mind paying a 5% tax after years of tax avoidance. But that’s just one of the many reasons why I am not as wealthy as they are.

steveBK1234• 5 months ago

In agreement. It strikes me as contradictory to be so wealthy you can never spend it all, but price sensitive enough to uproot your life over a tax?

To paraphrase Don Draper - That's what the money is for! (to live the life you want)

But I think for many that make that much money is a scoreboard primarily, and they've given up any normalcy of a personal life so long ago to get it that they don't really know what to do with themselves once they have the money.

_DeadFred_6• 5 months ago

So he spent as much on his new house as his lifetime charity giving? Classy guy.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbeswealthteam/2026/02/09/ame...

eudamoniac2• 5 months ago

How much is your lifetime charity giving, out of curiosity?

jdlshore• 5 months ago

If you think wealth inequality is a societal problem, billionaires leaving to avoid taxes is a feature, not a bug.

tehjoker• 5 months ago

Not really, so long as they influence affairs on planet earth, their wealth and influence will continue to cause compounding problems.

cgio2• 5 months ago

This is a correct observation. The question is whether it’s meaningful to pursue local coherence when locality is vague. E.g. can someone at that level just declare permanent residence in a place but maintain their lifestyle in another? At country level they cover that with tax residence, I am not sure whether that’s the case between states in the US. Even as such, people who get on their plane as frequently as I get in my car are not subject to the same residence considerations.

tkel4• 5 months ago

Are they still able to own corporations in California while living out of state? Then it's still a bug.

tkel4• 5 months ago

This kinda misses the larger point. How are billionaires created? By the structure of the capitalist firm. The capitalist gets all of the wealth created by the organization and unilaterally can decide what to do with it, running the organization as a dictator. That is the bug. "Billionaire" is simply the most obvious and egregious form.

The class interest of the billionaire capitalist is the same as the class interest of the millionaire capitalist is the same as the class interest of the small business owner. Unless all of the capitalists leave, the capitalist class will still control the entire economy of California.

lapcat• 5 months ago

it has cost California both Larry's presence and all the tax revenue it made from him.

1. Google itself isn't moving. I don't think Larry is closely involved anymore, and a move out of state seems to prove that.

2. How much tax revenue did California even make from him? If he doesn't sell stock, then he has no capital gains to tax. That's the whole point of the wealth tax. The ultra-wealthy are infamous for tax avoidance schemes such as rotating loans against their stock to avoid capital gains.

lotsofpulp3• 5 months ago

#2 is a problem with California’s tax laws. A marginal land value tax would easily tax wealth without wealthy people having to sell assets. Also, more economic activity, such as rich people buying products and services, results in sales tax and income for other Californians.

selridge3• 5 months ago

Take that up with the CA voters circa 1979.

mc32• 5 months ago

NYC had a similar budgetary/fiscal issue too and they thought they'd manage it by assessing more taxes on companies and people. The result was corporate as well as individual flight.

It's tough to slim down on spending. Be it individuals or governments and quasi-governmental organizations. Companies can swiftly implement spending cuts and RIFs --sometimes aggressively.

Governments, though, there are threads throughout --elected officials often trade support for positions and favoritism and if they take those away, so do many of their fiercest people who get out the vote. Also, their voters are averse to having the services they've grown accustomed to getting cut.

So sometimes you need that official who knows he or she is a one termer but will go in and cut and cut. People will hate them but it will allow the government a chance to make a turnaround.

zeroonetwothree2• 5 months ago

IMO capital gains taxes are bad as well, they discourage efficient investment allocation (you are stuck with what you have now).

It would be better if we mainly taxed consumption directly. If you are a billionaire but spend $100k/yr I am fine with you paying the same taxes as anyone else spending $100k/yr.

rickydroll2• 5 months ago

Taxing consumption hurts people more at the lower end of the income scale than at the higher end. It all comes down to what reserves you have to accommodate different scales of financial events. For example, will not having enough money for a tank of gas break you, or just annoy you? Could you survive needing an ambulance ride? Do copays keep you from seeing the doctor, or are they just a rounding error on your income?

I believe that taxing people proportionally on income earned by labor is a unifying element of a social contract. i.e., we are all contributing to the common good. Income from capital is "free money." You didn't work for it; you took it from somebody else in the form of interest, dividends, or some other rent-seeking financial magic.

At some point, wealth becomes corrosive to society. People acquire it just for the sake of acquiring more and building their personal power. It seems that wealth is used to build more mechanisms of rent-seeking to further extract money from people who make their money through labor.

That kind of non-beneficial use of wealth, rent-seeking, and financial magic should be the target of any tax system before taxing money earned by labor.

_DeadFred_6• 5 months ago

If you are able to leverage the current value of stocks to gain personal benefit, you should be taxed on them as if you recognized the value. If you just let them sit, don't use them as collateral, don't take out loans against them, then they shouldn't be taxed.

But if you recognize some benefit based on their value, you absolutely should pay taxes on that value.

bdangubic2• 5 months ago

he was freeloading in CA and now will be freeloading in FL

tim-tday• 5 months ago

He better watch out. Google instituted a strict return to office mandate. They also frown on people working apart from their teams. He might have to go back and badge in a couple times a week to make it look like he’s still working out of the Mountain View office.

georgemcbay2• 5 months ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eo-KmOd3i7s

snapetom• 5 months ago

This part from Paul Graham on his own move was eye opening:

"After we'd been in England for several years, I asked the people who do our taxes to check, and they told me that I actually saved money by moving to England. That's how high California state taxes are already."

selridge3• 5 months ago

Yeah sounds like he was really scrimping.

steveBK1234• 5 months ago

I have a lot of UK employees and the tax system is quite strange compared to US. One of them described it to me as a "great place to already be rich".

If you make under say $200-250k, you pay way way higher taxes in the UK. Above that, if you are in a high tax US city/state .. US total fed/state/local taxes start to pull well ahead at the $500k & $1M income levels.

Seems like a defect.

AceJohnny2• 5 months ago

I wonder how he figures that. I'm well paid and my CA taxes are 1/3 as much as my Federal taxes. Especially in the current regime, CA taxes are not first my point of complaint.

This just reinforces my opinion that we shouldn't listen to billionaires about anything.

kgwxd• 5 months ago

Does anything this dope post automatically make it to the front page?

disqard• 5 months ago

A worthwhile question.

Also, worth keeping in mind how posts that are "unrelated to technology itself" could arguably trigger the hard-core contingent here. So, just like how Trump's or Elon's bloviations get flagged here, PG's posts could, in theory, also evoke the purest hacker mentality -- at scale.

Interpret it as you wish :)

matt_daemon• 5 months ago

HN rage bait

selridge3• 5 months ago

Better dead in California than alive in Florida, to paraphrase.

camillomiller• 5 months ago

What a vomit-inducing billionaire fondling. It’s patently and provably false the taxing billionaires will make them flee and therefore society is worse off for that. It’s a disgusting narrative by greedy antisocial people who have lost every and any contact with the meaning of living in society. You wanna make things better for the world? Then fuck your disingenuous startups, pay more taxes. Fucking leeches, each and everyone of these scumbags. PG absolutely included.

jzellis• 5 months ago

Oh no, his assistant will be buying all his groceries at a Florida Whole Foods instead of a California one and he'll be topping up his private jet at the Miami Airport instead of Oakland oh noooo how will California survive

bdangubic2• 5 months ago

The story here should be “Larry Page, a billionaire, was a legal resident of California to begin with”

He can live anywhere he wants to and have residency anywhere he wants to. This sounds like “Larry can’t afford to live in Cali and is forced to “move” to Florida and never set foot in Cali ever again” He’ll move his mail and get FL Driver License and continue to chill in Cali (which he should have done decade ago

tkel4• 5 months ago

People don't realize that "philanthropy" is a standard way for ultra-rich to peddle influence and store their money to avoid taxes. Many philanthropies invest their donations and actually make money off investments every year, spending little. It is an investment vehicle. And an easy way to accept bribes. And for influence, take for example Bill Gates' "philanthropy" to fund charter schools and undermine public schools, ultimately enriching charter school capitalists.

This thread showcases exactly why they do this: It is enough to simply slap the name "philanthropy" on something in order to have people thinking it is good and defending you. It is an effective PR stunt, which is why they all do it. Don't be the fool.

ChrisArchitect• 5 months ago

Related previously:

Larry Page leaves California to protect $12.5B from proposed wealth tax

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46556803

dwighttk• 5 months ago

What we need is worldwide open borders, except out… no one can leave once they get here

tempodox• 5 months ago

I feel for the tax fugitives who are too poor to afford living in California any longer.

Larry Page has moved to Florida

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