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Welcome, Weekenders! Next Tuesday promises to be something of a doozy. At the moment, the Democrats are poised to take back both the Senate and the House of Representatives and clean up nicely in gubernatorial races across the country. And for those of you in California who haven’t decamped to the pine-studded shores of Nevada’s Incline Village, we’ll find out whether you’ll need to find a good financial planner. Or a sharkish attorney. Yes, Tuesday is billionaire tax judgment day, with California voters getting a chance to decide on Proposition 40, the ballot proposal that hopes to enact a one-time 5% tax on billion-dollar fortunes to fund healthcare and education in the state. The plan has caused great agita among the tech elite. And while I can’t imagine a tremendous number of the people reading this newsletter would favor the proposal, I suggest anyone on the fence—or already in support—should read what Rippling founder Parker Conrad has been saying on X to understand exactly why the idea seems somewhat harebrained. The outcome looks tight. While polls from earlier this year showed fairly strong support for Prop 40, more recent ones suggest voters have turned more negative on the idea. A fresh poll by Politico found 45% of likely voters in favor, 43% against it and 12% undecided. Prediction-market traders take a dim view of Prop 40’s odds. Polymarket scores just 23% in favor, while Kalshi shows just about the same. Granted, prediction markets weren’t great leading indicators lately for election results in Brazil and Israel. The weakening support among voters comes after a slew of Democratic-aligned groups and trade unions have voiced opposition to Prop 40, including Planned Parenthood, the California Teachers Association and the California Medical Association. Those organizations have varied criticisms of Prop 40—one being that they think state lawmakers won’t actually get the money to healthcare and education. California Gov. Gavin Newsom has also said he opposes Prop 40. Should Prop 40 fail, it’ll be a victory for the Sergey Brins and Patrick Collisons of the world, who’ve spent months campaigning against the proposal and committing enormous sums of money to ads and other measures to defeat it. The best-funded group dedicated to torpedoing Prop 40 is Building a Better California, which itself has raised $330 million from Brin, Stripe’s Collison, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, venture capitalist Vinod Khosla and Kleiner Perkins’ John Doerr, among many others. And even if Prop 40 passes, both supporters and opponents expect a lengthy series of court battles over its constitutionality. Prop 40 has been a constant matter of discussion in the conversations that Cooper Teboe, an indefatigable Democratic operative in California, has with wealthy donors. “It comes up 20 times a day,” he said. “Folks really, really care about it.” The prospect of Prop 40’s approval has led some wealthy Californians to hesitate to make political donations to Democrats at a time when the newly reascendant party might hope to bring the tech elite back into the fold. “It has made some of them throw up their arms and just say ‘Fuck it’ to the Democrats,” Teboe said. “I’ve heard from a few people who have stopped giving money because they’re like, ‘OK, this wealth tax thing is going to wipe me out. I’m going to save every single dollar I can for this tax.’” Even if Prop 40 fails, Teboe believes its mere existence is a harbinger of things to come and expects to see similar measures pop up around the country over the next few years. Teboe finds that many of the donors seem disconnected from the general unease most Americans feel about the state of the economy—a discontent over high inflation and the uncertainty of AI’s impact on jobs. The most contact those donors have with more ordinary mortals, Teboe said, is in “the conversations that they have with staff on the way to their Porsche.”—Abram Brown (abe@theinformation.com) The Information’s Must-Read StoriesCan AI Help Ray Kurzweil Cheat Death?Why Publishers Are Adding Invisible Ads for AI Agents How Instacart Ended Up in DoorDash’s Cart OpenAI, a Longtime Nvidia Customer, Plans to Buy Google’s AI Chips Listening: “Midnight Radio” Actor Ethan Hawke has enjoyed several good cinematic outings with screenwriters Scott Derrickson and C. Robert Cargill, who penned the scripts for “The Black Phone” and “The Black Phone 2,” horror films that starred Hawke. (Derrickson and Cargill also wrote “Sinister.”) The trio has reunited for “Midnight Radio,” a fictional podcast that borrows from the sensibilities of “The Twilight Zone” and “The X-Files.” Hawke is the unnamed host of a late-night radio show dedicated to exploring conspiracy theories and the supernatural. He’s been at it for some time, and while he still has a devoted fanbase, he seems a bit bored by his program—that is, until a man who claims to be a former U.S. astronaut calls up Hawke’s character with a whopper of a story: He and another astronaut actually beat the Russians as the first people to orbit the Earth. Only one of them returned home, a journey that involved interdimensional travel. But why is he suddenly revealing his saga on air to a podunk AM jockey? According to the former astronaut, it’s because he’s recently decoded a series of secret messages hidden in radio broadcasts that identified the geographical coordinates of the station from which Hawke’s character broadcasts. The story’s events unfold in real time—keeping the tension high—and Hawke is joined in the cast by Vincent D’Onofrio, Noah Centineo and Hawke’s son, Levon.—Abram Brown Reading: “Princes and Thieves” by Matthew Cole Last week, attorneys for Jared Kushner, the Trump son-in-law who serves as one of America’s top Middle East envoys, threatened to sue journalist Matthew Cole over an early excerpt from “Princes and Thieves,” Cole’s account of Kushner’s role in the first Trump administration. The excerpt contained an explosive allegation—that Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates had placed $2 billion in bank accounts for Kushner during Donald Trump’s initial presidency, part of a broader conspiracy between Kushner and the Arab royals to influence U.S. foreign policy and remake the Middle East. In response to the legal threat, the book’s publisher released “Princes and Thieves” several days early. Cole’s details about Kushner’s alleged schemes will make your mouth hang open. (Kushner denies it all.) Here’s just some of what Cole says happened: The money deposited in the accounts came after a 2016 meeting between Kushner and the Emiratis at the Four Seasons hotel in Manhattan, a discussion in which the Emiratis laid out their keen interest in working with the incoming Trump White House. (Relations had been chilly with President Barack Obama.) After Kushner later met with the Emiratis and the Saudis to discuss their grievances against Qatar, the two countries began their yearslong blockade of that country; in their minds, Kushner had given them a tacit greenlight. The blockade ended in 2021—just as Qatar struck a secret deal to financially rescue a New York office tower owned by Kushner’s father. In addition, the Arab money channeled to Kushner was partly dispensed to Erik Prince, the Blackwater founder, who attempted to arm a Libyan warlord, among other things.Kushner is one of two principal characters in “Princes and Thieves.” The other is Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan (aka MBZ), the Emirati ruler. The sheikh loves a scheme—take how he ascended the throne by discrediting his older half-brother and revealing his sibling’s gay affairs to their father. (The UAE does not follow strict primogeniture.) Later, MBZ struck up a close relationship with his counterpart in Saudi Arabia, Prince Mohammed bin Salman, coaching the Saudi royal through his own ruthless climb. What both men wanted most was to neuter Iran, which they see as a grave threat. Sometimes MBZ roped Israel into his efforts against Iran, and Israel’s central bank administered one of the bank accounts for Kushner. Kushner himself, of course, is deeply interested in Israel and tried to arrange a deal between Israel and the Palestinians during the first Trump administration. “Jared wanted the Gulf royals to support his attempt to force the Palestinians into a deal with Israel,” Cole writes. “In return, the Gulf royals wanted aggressive U.S. policy on Iran.” The money in the bank accounts provided to Kushner “would grease the wheels.” Cole does not know precisely what happened to all the money in the accounts earmarked for Kushner. Nor does he know how much Trump knew about Kushner’s actions. And while his reporting for “Princes and Thieves” largely concludes with Trump’s departure from office in 2021, Cole casts a spotlight on the obvious specter that hangs over the current Trump White House: Kushner has returned to the Middle East in a role with no congressional oversight—just as Trump has provoked a war with Iran. Such an outcome seems exactly what MBZ would’ve wanted.—A.B. Watching: “Below” On a remote island off Canada’s coast, the residents of Snook’s Arm, the fictional setting of this new Netflix series, are barely scraping by. The authorities want them to relocate—but some locals are holding out, including the rather weathered-looking Calvin Penney (Josh Hartnett), who makes a living scooping up chunks of glacial ice and selling them to the one thriving business in town, a vodka distillery that has won a little fame for making its liquor from genuine, melted-down icebergs. When he hauls in a smelly block of frozen matter that the distillery won’t buy, he takes it over to a local scientist (Mackenzie Davis), who quickly discovers—eek—it’s not ice but a giant hunk of mucus membrane. Penney’s not quite sure what to make of that revelation, and besides, he’s got other things on his mind, like trying to convince his daughter, Mary (Ruby Stokes), to return home and hold onto his ne’er-do-well son Wade (Charlie Heaton from “Stranger Things”). A third Calvin offspring, Jay (Rohan Campbell), is in his own share of trouble. “Below” has a pleasant, winky off-kilteredness to it, a tone that reminded me a little of Apple’s “Widow’s Bay,” another horror-comedy mashup about the strange happenings on a weird island—though, yes, it is impossible to imagine Snook’s Arm ever becoming the next Martha’s Vineyard. The show moves fast: By the end of the first episode, a giant mass of tentacles has already ripped apart one of Calvin’s iceberg-hunting rivals. (Yeah, gross.) With all the melted ice bobbing around, “Below” is determined to have something to say about the world’s climate crisis. Hartnett’s innate appeal and the presence of that fearsome beastie from, uh, below keep it quite entertaining.—A.B.
document fetched 2026-11-01 02:56 · canonical https://theinformation.com/articles/billionaire-tax-might-fail-for-now