Palmer Luckey Says He Will Stay in California Despite Billionaire Wealth Tax

Palmer Luckey says the proposed California billionaire wealth tax could cost him roughly $3 billion on his Anduril stake alone — and he is staying in the state anyway.

"As of right now, though, I'm not running. I am staying. I think California is something special. I want to fight for California," Luckey said during an invite-only press conference on Monday.

Luckey, 33, has been a California billionaire since he was 21, when he sold his virtual reality headset maker Oculus VR to Facebook for $2 billion in 2014. His current company, the defense tech firm Anduril, is headquartered in Costa Mesa, California, not far from Long Beach, where he grew up. Anduril was last valued at $61 billion.

The ballot measure would tax the net worth of the state's richest residents. Its sponsors — who Luckey noted include a unit of the United Healthcare Workers union — say the money would fund "health care, education, and food assistance" programs, and they specifically name Medi-Cal, California's health coverage program for low-income residents.

The pitch sounds simple. The mechanics, in Luckey's reading, are not.

What does the tax actually reach?

The proposal would tax "wealth" including unrealized assets that have not been sold and illiquid assets that are hard to turn into cash. Penalties can be assessed as high as 40%.

"It's almost like a seizure of future wealth in that way," Luckey said. "That's not even the real problem. The biggest problem is the tax on control of your own company."

According to the Tax Foundation, a tax policy think tank, the proposal would treat someone with voting control as owning at least that same share of the company. That matters for founders holding super-voting shares, which carry extra votes per share but may represent only a minority of actual ownership. A founder with 40% of the votes but 10% of the equity could be taxed as if they owned at least 40% — and selling every share might not cover the bill.

The measure's drafters dispute that reading. They argue super-voting shares are publicly traded assets valued differently. The dispute is unresolved, and it sits at the center of the fight.

Luckey's own structure is a case study. "I'm a founder who's raised a bunch of money, I've diluted myself a lot. I've given equity to my employees," he said. "My employees have more equity in Anduril than me." He has preserved his voting rights so that as employees sell shares — to pay off home loans, in his example — voting control stays inside the company.

In his case, he believes he could owe 5% of Anduril's $61 billion, about $3 billion, on that asset alone. For context, Larry Page, the Google co-founder who did leave California, still holds 27% voting control of Alphabet, which has a market value of just under $4 trillion.

Why can't Luckey just relocate?

Leaving would cost him control outright. "I lose all those voting rights. My voting rights only stick as long as I'm an American citizen living in America, running Anduril," he said.

That condition is not arbitrary. Anduril is primarily a defense contractor selling equipment to the U.S. military, a business where foreign or expatriate ownership of control raises obvious flags.

What about billionaire peer pressure?

Luckey said he has felt pressure from other billionaires to publicly declare his intention to leave.

"This has been a point of friction between me and some of my other billionaire friends," he said. "They've said things like 'Palmer, you have to have solidarity for us. You can't enable these really bad policies. If you stay and if you don't leave, it's going to show them that there's no consequences.'"

His answer: not now. "I empathize with that argument, but it's not one that I'm going to participate in right now because I still believe that we can fix things," he said.

He also drew a line between taxes and this tax. His objection is not paying taxes, he said, but that the bill is sponsored by a specific union that wants to use the revenue "for their uses." The sponsors counter that the money funds public programs, including Medi-Cal.

"I think that this tax act, if you can call it that, is going to cause a lot of problems. It's causing a lot of people to run who I don't want to be running. It's going to cause companies that I work with to leave the state, which is a problem for me," Luckey said. Note what that claim lacks: no headcount, no names, no estimate of how many partners are weighing an exit.

What happens if it passes?

Luckey's plan is two-fold: fight the measure before a vote, and fight it in court after.

"But I'm planning on staying in California. I'm going to keep fighting it," he said. "I'm hoping that this doesn't pass. I'm hoping if it does pass, that there are legal challenges to say, 'Hey, you can't post facto seize people's past and future wealth, nor can you tax their voting interests in their own company. That's truly unprecedented. That is not a tax on ownership. It is a tax on control.'"

If the measure reaches the ballot and passes, the near-certain next act is litigation over whether taxing unrealized, illiquid and voting-linked wealth survives constitutional scrutiny — and whether founders like Luckey keep control without leaving.