The moral theater of the modern regulatory state demands a villain, and Mark Zuckerberg—with his dead-eyed corporate apologies and imperial haircuts—has always played the part with eerie perfection. So when word surfaced that Meta quietly maneuvered to foot the bill should California ever enact its long-threatened wealth tax on billionaires, the collective gasp from the commentariat was entirely rehearsed. How dare he? How monstrously selfish, how obscenely decadent, to let the company pay the sovereign’s tribute!
Yet I find myself asking an inconvenient question: what on earth did Sacramento think was going to happen?
The entire premise of the wealth tax, that darling catechism of the American progressive imagination, rests on a profound, almost touching naivety. It assumes that wealth at that scale is a chest of gold doubloons buried under a mattress, waiting to be counted by an earnest civil servant. It ignores the singular, defining truth of late-stage financialized capitalism—that capital does not sit still, and the men who command it do not pay retail. To attempt to fleece an oligarch through the blunt instrument of state taxation is to fundamentally misunderstand who writes the rules of corporate indemnity.
Consider the mechanics of this little arrangement. Should California’s lawmakers successfully pass their levy on unrealized gains and phantom wealth, Zuckerberg will not reach into his pocket. Instead, Meta’s board—beholden, naturally, to a dual-class share structure that renders accountability an abstract joke—will step in. The costs will be metabolized into the corporate bloodstream, diluted across balance sheets, and absorbed by institutional shareholders. That means the teacher pension funds, the index-tracking 401(k)s, and the retail investors will quietly pay Mark’s ransom to the state, all so the legislature can boast of humbling the tech barons.
It is a closed-circuit farce. The state threatens the prince; the prince raids the village commons to settle the debt; the state declares victory and funds another tranche of municipal consultants. The wealth tax was never going to liquidate the fortunes of the Silicon Valley elite. It was only ever going to create a new category of executive compensation, legally wrapped in the dry language of corporate liability protection. We have merely witnessed the codification of what was always inevitable: when you tax an entity that controls the currency of human attention, that entity simply passes the invoice down to the users.
This is the deeper rot of our contemporary governance, visible everywhere from the protest bans in Marseille to the hand-wringing over Russian spooks in Berlin. Our institutions retain the rhetoric of absolute authority, but none of the actual leverage. They pass sweeping decrees, posture before the cameras, and construct punitive legal frameworks, entirely blind to the fact that the targets of their ire vacated the jurisdiction long ago.
So let California proceed with its crusade. Let the progressives celebrate their paper victory, and let the treasury project billions in hypothetical revenue. Mark Zuckerberg will not lose a single hour of sleep, nor an acre of his Hawaiian redoubt. He has discovered what every feudal lord eventually learns when confronted by an overzealous king: as long as you own the castle, the peasants can always be made to pay the siege tax.
Cassius Wren