Billionaire Sergey Brin has broken his silence on California’s proposed billionaire tax — invoking his Soviet upbringing as new details surface on a tense showdown with Gov. Gavin Newsom and his Trump-loving ‘gut influencer’ girlfriend.
Brin, the Google co-founder with an estimated net worth of $270 billion, discussed his family history under socialism in an extraordinary rebuke of the billionaire tax, which qualified for the November ballot after organizers submitted 1.6 million signatures.
“I fled socialism with my family in 1979 and know the devastating, oppressive society it created in the Soviet Union,” Brin told the New York Times in a statement.
“I don’t want California to end up in the same place.”
Media reports revealed this weekend that Brin had personally confronted Newsom, who opposes the billionaire tax, at aChristmas “treehouse party”hosted by billionaire Ripple chairman Chris Larsen.
Brin, who has been friendly with Newsom for decades, pulled the governor into a side room at the Marin County bash and said he could not tolerate the billionaire tax, the paper reports.
Brin’s girlfriend of two years, Gerelyn Gilbert-Soto, was reportedly at the center of a dramatic holiday confrontation — arguing the tax would kill the economy but also joking that she could forgive Newsom’s bad policies because he is “handsome.”
The California governor later complained that the couple gave him a “lingering cold,” per Bloomberg.
Brin was born in Moscow, Russia in 1973 and fled to the United States at the age of six.
The billionaire tax could leave Brin, whose estimated net worth is about $270 billion, with a $13 billion tax bill.
Source: California Post – Breaking California News, Photos & Videos
