Does Taxing Millionaires Make Them Leave? What the Evidence Actually Shows
The Million Dollar Question: Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang’s estimated bill under California’s 2026 billionaire tax is about $8 billion. What did he call paying it?
A) Theft B) A privilege and a responsibility C) Unconstitutional D) A rounding errorRead on for the answer.
Two of the most mobile, most advised, most option-rich people on the planet got hit with the same California tax bill in the same year. One moved his holding companies to Delaware before the clock ran out. The other, with a bigger bill, said he hadn’t given it a second thought. Somewhere between those two reactions is the real answer to a question that gets asserted far more often than it gets measured: when governments tax the wealthy more, do the wealthy actually leave?
What it is
The question sounds like one question and is actually two, and conflating them is most of why the debate goes in circles. The first is a US state-level question: when a state raises income, capital-gains, or wealth taxes on high earners, what share of them relocate to avoid it? The second is a different, UK-centered question: when a country changes its tax treatment of non-domiciled residents and inheritance, do its existing millionaires and billionaires leave the country entirely? Both questions get asked about “the rich” as though the answer transfers across borders. It mostly doesn’t, because the tax structures, the exit costs, and the alternatives next door are different in each case — which is exactly why this piece treats them separately rather than averaging them into one number.
The sharpest current version of the first question is California’s Proposition 40, a one-time 5% tax on the net worth of state residents worth more than $1 billion as of January 1, 2026, paid in installments of 1% a year over five years and aimed at roughly $100 billion from an estimated 200 people, per the Legislative Analyst’s Office. The sharpest current version of the second is the UK’s run of post-Budget non-dom and inheritance-tax changes, which Henley & Partners and others track through actual millionaire emigration forecasts rather than ballot mechanics.
Who’s actually being tested
Three very different populations are doing the moving — or not moving — in this story, and keeping them separate matters. California’s Prop 40 touches only the roughly 200 people in the state worth more than $1 billion. Washington state’s newer 9.9% income tax on households earning more than $1 million, passed as Senate Bill 6346 in 2026, touches a much larger and less exotic group: successful professionals, business owners, and executives, not necessarily billionaires. And the UK numbers describe its entire millionaire population — about 442,000 people, the lowest count since 2007 — a population two orders of magnitude larger than California’s Prop 40 cohort, facing a different kind of tax change (non-dom and inheritance rules, not a one-time net-worth levy).
That size difference alone explains part of why the headlines feel contradictory. A handful of nine-figure and ten-figure net-worth individuals making a visible, reported decision is a very different data point than a national trend line across hundreds of thousands of households — and both can be true at once.
The US evidence: stay rates, not exodus
Start with the data that covers the most people over the longest stretch of time, because it’s also the data that gets cited the least when someone wants a dramatic headline. The Fiscal Policy Institute’s analysis of IRS-linked state tax data found that states with dedicated millionaire taxes — California, Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, and Washington, D.C. — had 7.3 millionaires per 1,000 tax filers in 2023, against a national average of 5.0. That gap hasn’t been shrinking as those taxes have aged; it widened from about 1.2 millionaires per 1,000 filers above the national average in 2010 to roughly 2.3 by 2023. New York, the state most often cited as the test case for millionaire flight, saw its millionaire concentration tick up over the same period rather than down. Florida — the supposed destination for all those departures — actually saw its millionaire share decline in 2023.
Washington offers a live, smaller-scale version of the same pattern. After the state’s capital-gains tax took effect, reporting on the aftermath noted plainly that “we’ve seen no mass exodus” despite the predictions that preceded it. For the newer, broader SB 6346 income tax, Cornell economist Cristobal Young — whose research is the most frequently cited empirical work on this exact question — put the likely relocation effect at around 1.9% of the households affected, a number state Senate Majority Leader Jamie Pedersen summarized more bluntly: “There may be individual people, but I don’t think that there’s going to be any significant change in taxpayer location as a result of the passage of the tax.” Not zero. Not nothing. But a long way from an exodus, and consistent with the aggregate IRS pattern above.
It’s worth sitting with why the Fiscal Policy Institute’s framing cuts against intuition so sharply. The obvious prediction is that a state taxing millionaires more should, over time, bleed millionaires to states that tax them less — Florida and Texas chief among them. The data runs the other way for a simple reason researchers in this field keep landing on: the things that make someone a millionaire in the first place — a dense job market in finance, tech, law, or medicine; universities; a deep pool of other high earners to do business with — are concentrated in exactly the high-tax, high-service states doing the taxing. Leaving for a lower tax bill often means leaving the professional ecosystem that generated the income being taxed, which is a much larger cost than the marginal tax rate for most people, even ones who could technically afford to go.
The named-individual exception
None of that means nobody moves, and California’s billionaire tax produced the cleanest real-time test case of who actually does. Larry Page converted several of his holding entities — his family office Koop, Flu Lab LLC, One Aero, and Oceankind — from California to Delaware in the final days of December 2025, ahead of Prop 40’s January 1 residency snapshot. At an estimated net worth near $270 billion, Page’s bill under the measure would run to roughly $13 billion. Peter Thiel was separately reported by the New York Times to be weighing a departure from California by the end of 2025 — reported as a consideration, not a confirmed move.
Set against that: Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, with an estimated net worth between $152 billion and $184 billion and roughly an $8 billion bill, told CBS News he wasn’t troubled by it at all: “I’m not afraid of paying taxes. I’m just afraid of being poor.” He called the $8 billion “a privilege” and “a responsibility,” and pointed to Nvidia’s roots in Silicon Valley’s talent pool as the reason he’s staying. And two other prominent names moved money into Florida real estate without necessarily changing their tax domicile: Mark Zuckerberg closed on a $170 million Indian Creek estate and Sergey Brin bought a $51 million Allison Island property through a Nevada-registered LLC, purchases a real-estate broker quoted in the coverage tied directly to the California tax — “we believe the catalyst in the billionaire migration to South Florida from California is more about the billionaire tax” — while cautioning that buying a backup home in Florida is not the same legal act as giving up California residency. Both men could theoretically owe more than $10 billion each under Prop 40’s structure if they remained California residents on the relevant date; owning a Florida house doesn’t by itself change that.
What it actually costs to leave
This is the part general-population tax-migration debates skip, and it’s the hinge the whole question turns on: changing tax domicile for someone this wealthy is not a change of mailing address. It means tracking day-counts in each jurisdiction (most residency tests turn on spending fewer than roughly half the year in the state or country being left), restructuring where holding entities and family offices are organized (as Page’s Delaware move shows), unwinding or relocating business operations that may be tied to a physical headquarters, and in the UK’s case, weighing the loss of non-dom status and inheritance-tax protections that used to make staying worth the higher headline rate. None of that happens by filling out a form. It is expensive, logistically heavy, often disruptive to a family’s schooling and social ties, and — per the stay-rate data above — something most people with the means to do it still decide isn’t worth doing.
The destination side of the US story shows what “actually moved” looks like at scale. South Florida’s primary-residency billionaire count — people who have actually established homestead residency, not just bought a vacation property — ran to 53 individuals across Miami-Dade, Palm Beach, and Broward counties in 2026, with $657.2 billion in combined wealth, up 13% from the year before, led by Jeff Bezos ($224 billion, Miami-Dade), Ken Griffin ($49.8 billion, Miami), David Tepper ($23.7 billion, Palm Beach), and Stephen Ross ($17 billion, Palm Beach). That’s the real migration — the people who crossed the full legal and logistical bar of changing where they actually live — set against a much larger group of merely-adjacent names who bought real estate without (yet) doing the same.
The UK side: where the departures are real
If the US evidence leans toward “mostly a myth, with real exceptions,” the UK evidence does not. Henley & Partners’ Wealth Migration Report forecasts the UK losing roughly 16,500 millionaires to emigration — more than double the approximately 9,500 the firm had forecast the year before, with the UAE as the single biggest destination. That forecast lines up with a falling headcount at home: the UK’s millionaire population has dropped to about 442,000, its lowest level since 2007 and roughly 7% below the prior year.
Individual departures back up the aggregate numbers with names and figures. Chris Rokos, described as Britain’s third-largest individual taxpayer, reportedly paid an estimated £330 million (roughly $432 million) in UK tax in the most recent tax year before announcing plans to move his tax residency to Greece, drawn by Greece’s 5% flat rate on carried interest for fund managers — a rate that makes the arithmetic of staying in the UK difficult to defend to shareholders, whatever his personal preference might otherwise be. Jim Ratcliffe, the INEOS billionaire and Manchester United co-owner, said publicly that he has “lost confidence” in the UK, citing both tax policy and immigration policy as reasons. And outside the UK, Australian entrepreneur Adrian Portelli — worth an estimated $1.41 billion and ranked fourth on the AFR’s Young Rich List — relocated to Dubai in August 2026, citing safety and his children’s schooling alongside Dubai’s tax-free status as reasons, and saying he kept Australia’s tax office informed throughout a three-year planning process rather than leaving abruptly.
The structural difference from the US cases matters here. California and Washington are taxing people more while those people remain inside the same federal tax system, the same dollar, and a short flight from dozens of other US states with no income tax at all — a menu of lower-tax options that still cost something in logistics but nothing in passport, language, or legal system. The UK changes that produced Rokos’s and others’ departures didn’t just raise a rate; they removed a specific, long-standing carve-out — non-domiciled tax status — that had been the whole reason some wealthy foreign-connected residents were based in London rather than somewhere else. Take away the exception a decision was built on, rather than just raising the general rate, and the decision calculus changes more completely.
What people get wrong
The first and biggest mistake is treating “a visible handful of billionaires leave” and “the large majority of high earners stay” as if they contradict each other. They don’t — they’re both true, at different scales, among different populations, which is exactly the pattern the US data shows: a few of the most mobile, most advised people make a reported move while the broader millionaire population barely shifts.
The second mistake is reading “has considered leaving” as equivalent to “is leaving.” The UK’s own Wealth Club survey is the clearest illustration: 61% of the 341 millionaire-investor clients surveyed (average wealth about £4.5 million) said they’d at least considered leaving over tax — but only 16% described themselves as actively considering it, 45% said they’d thought about it but were unlikely to actually move, and 36% had never considered it at all. Intent-to-leave surveys are a real signal of sentiment, not a count of departures, and the gap between the two is usually large.
The third mistake is assuming the US and UK cases are the same experiment with the same result. They’re testing different things: California and Washington are testing whether people leave in response to a new or higher tax while most comparable alternatives (other US states) still involve some federal tax burden and real logistical cost; the UK is testing whether people leave a country entirely, with an EU-adjacent, Gulf-adjacent menu of lower-tax jurisdictions a short flight away and a changing non-dom regime that specifically targeted the advantage some of them were there for in the first place. Different incentives, different exit costs, different answer.
Bottom line
Final Answer: B — a privilege and a responsibility. That’s what Jensen Huang called his roughly $8 billion Prop 40 bill, and he isn’t moving. The honest synthesis of the evidence: in the United States, the weight of IRS-linked data and state-level experience says taxing high earners and the wealthy more does not, in the aggregate, cause them to leave in large numbers — millionaire-tax states have held or grown their millionaire concentration for well over a decade. But that aggregate truth coexists with real, named, reported exceptions among the smallest and most mobile group — the Larry Pages of the world — who do go through the real cost of changing domicile when the number gets large enough. In the UK, the picture inverts: the departures are large, forecast to more than double year over year, and backed by a falling millionaire headcount, because the exit costs are lower and the alternatives are closer. “Does taxing millionaires make them leave” doesn’t have one answer. It has two, and which one applies depends entirely on which millionaires, which tax, and which country you’re asking about.
Related reading: Taxing the Billionaires: Wealth-Tax Debates From California to Warren · The Price of Not Being Taxed: Inside the Campaign Against Prop 40 · Billionaires Flood Miami: Wealth Migration and the New American Geography · Residency and Citizenship: Why the Wealthy Buy Options Across Borders · Offshore: Tax Havens, Shell Companies, and the Panama Papers
