New group calls billionaires ‘value creators’ who are ‘building, not taking’ — and say they’re not joking around
by Joe Rivano Barros February 1, 2026 (MissionLocal.org)
A new group is advertising a “March for Billionaires” in San Francisco on Saturday — either a Swiftian attempt to parrot Silicon Valley executives who are raging against a planned California billionaire tax, or an earnest try to ward it off.
“Vilifying billionaires is popular. Losing them is expensive,” reads the group’s website, which is scant and gives no indication of who is behind the effort. The site links to BlueSky and X accounts — the latter is @ProBillionaires — and records show it was created on Jan. 29.
Organizers say the effort is very real.
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“We sincerely believe what we’re saying,” the organizers wrote in a message. “We think most American billionaires have had greatly positive societal impacts, directly and indirectly. We support wealth creation and oppose rent-seeking/extraction, anticompetitive practices, and regulatory capture.”
The organizers said they were staying anonymous due to backlash “and some threats” online, but that they were not taking any money from billionaires or “outside groups.”
The goal, they said, is to challenge anti-billionaire perspectives by “highlighting their contributions,” and to fight the billionaire tax, which “would be particularly harmful to the startup economy.”
The group’s language mimics tech executives who have been railing against the “Billionaire Tax Act,” which is being put forth by Service Employees International Union-United Healthcare Workers West and would institute a one-time wealth tax on those with a net worth over $1 billion. The measure has yet to qualify for the ballot but, if successful, would tax billionaire residents 5 percent of their wealth.
SEIU-UHW says the tax would help backfill about $100 billion in “cuts to federal healthcare funding” and affect roughly 200 billionaires. The measure has received the backing of Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, California Rep. Ro Khanna, and the Teamsters California union. Khanna is working on a compromise measure.
Gov. Gavin Newsom opposes it. The state office that analyzes legislation wrote that the tax would likely add “tens of billions of dollars” to the California budget, but could result in ongoing tax losses of “hundreds of millions of dollars or more per year” if billionaires flee the state.
Silicon Valley is rising up against it. President Donald Trump’s crypto czar David Sacks called the measure an “asset seizure” and has reportedly left for Texas. Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan said the tax would “wholesale destroy business creation” in the state. Anduril founder Palmery Lucky (net worth: $3.6 billion) said he could be “screwed for life” and would be forced to “sell huge chunks” of his stock.
Google co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page have relocated dozens of limited liability companies and other business entities outside of California, and Brin has given $20 million to a political action committee that may fight the tax. Venture capitalist Peter Thiel has given $3 million to a similar effort.
The site calls billionaires “value creators” who are “building, not taking” and lists 10 of them, including Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, Page and Brin, the popstar Taylor Swift, the tennis champion Roger Federer, and James Dyson, who the site says “invented the bagless vacuum cleaner after 5,127 prototypes.”
“These billionaires didn’t steal from you,” it reads. “They created new products, new services, new possibilities that millions of people freely chose.”
On BlueSky, the group has shared Y Combinator founder Paul Graham’s well-known essay calling for a fight against poverty rather than inequality, and a post from Matthew Yglesias that reads, “It’s time to take a bold stand in defense of America’s oft-maligned billionaire class.”
It retweeted a post from Tan where the CEO is wearing, unironically, a shirt that reads, “We should have more billionaires.”
The in-person march is marketed for Feb. 7 at 11 a.m. It will start at Alta Plaza Park, in tony Pacific Heights, and end with a rally at City Hall.
In November, a “People Over Billionaires” march took a similar route through the wealthy area and stopped to chant in front of multi-million dollar homes: “Let’s stop these money grabbing maniacs from wrecking our world!”
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Joe Rivano BarrosSenior editor
joe.rivanobarros@missionlocal.com
Joe was born in Sweden, where half of his family received asylum after fleeing Pinochet, and then spent his early childhood in Chile; he moved to Oakland when he was eight. He attended Stanford University for political science and worked at Mission Local as a reporter after graduating. He then spent time at YIMBY Action and as a partner for the strategic communications firm The Worker Agency. He rejoined Mission Local as an editor in 2023. You can reach him on Signal @jrivanob.99.More by Joe Rivano Barros
