Escaping Californication, Moonlighting with Elon, Wealthiest VCs, Tech Bros say 'Californy ain't the place we ought to be, '28 comes in focus, and other sh*t that matters...
The simple joy of endless California summers gone by.
Elon jumps into the U.S. space race with China
Perhaps humbled by his DOGE experience, having only cut $215 billion in unnecessary centralized government programs and waste as of early 2026 (per its official site), far below his initial target of $2 trillion. But the Cowardly Lion has pivoted his space exploration goals from landing on Mars to prioritizing a ‘self-growing city’ on the Moon, which Elon says could be achieved in less than 10 years versus 20+ for Mars. The new Moon City would include an AI satellite factory and a massive catapult (mass driver) to launch satellites.
This combines SpaceX’s rocketry and satellite expertise with xAI’s AI technology (such as Grok) to unify efforts toward AI-driven space exploration. Elon frames the move as creating a ‘vertically integrated innovation engine’ for on— and off—Earth projects.
Meet your new $30,000 buddy.
The Tesla Optimus humanoid robot combines advanced AI-driven autonomy with incredibly dexterous, human-like hands and movements—allowing it to walk smoothly on uneven terrain, handle delicate objects like eggs, perform bi-manual tasks by human video learning, and tackle unsafe, repetitive, and boring jobs in homes and factories.
At Tesla, Elon announced the end of production for the Model S and Model X to repurpose factory lines for his Optimus humanoid robots. He’s emphasized Tesla’s shift toward ‘amazing abundance’ through AI and robotics, predicting a future of ‘universal high income.’🤔
The ‘Billionaire Tax’ has billionaires migrating elsewhere
The Tech Bros are fleeing California faster than the 8 million Venezuelans who escaped the Chavez/Maduro regimes. The 2026 Billionaire Tax Act is a proposed ballot initiative imposing a one-time 5% tax on net worth over $1.1 billion, retroactive to January 1, 2026, that targets about 200 billionaires to raise $100 billion primarily for healthcare.
The new Zuck: ‘F*ck that one-time 5% tax on my net worth over $1.1 billion—that works out to to $12 billion bro! I want to go to Miami!
The Act’s most vocal champion is Silicon Valley Congressman Ro Khanna, who emphasizes ‘shared prosperity,’🤔, yet opposed by the state’s top Donkey and presidential aspirant Gavin Newsom—surprise, surprise—who argues it could drive away investors (and his Super Donors?) and face legal challenges.
The first wave of tech exits in 2020-2021 saw figures like Elon Musk (Tesla/SpaceX), Billy Gurley (Formerly at Benchmark), Jim Breyer (Breyer Capital), and Joe Lonsdale (Palantir), and a whopping 74 corporate HQs relocate to Texas, the land of no state income tax.
The Billionaires Tax Act, California’s November 2026 ballot measure, was the straw that broke the back of the next wave of billionaires moving out of California, but this time to Florida. Consensus reports indicate that $1 trillion in assets have been shifted out Of the State already due to billionaire migration in late 2025 and early 2026.
The mult-billion asset shift…
Florida’s appeal lies in its tax policies, growing tech ecosystem, and secure, high-end communities, though surging demand has driven up costs in these neighborhoods.
Zuck and his wife, Priscilla Chan, are setting up in a waterfront mansion on Indian Creek Island in Miami, a 300-acre man-made barrier island dubbed the ‘Billionaire Bunker’ due to its armed private security for its residents that include Jeff Bezos, Tom Brady, and Ivanka Trump. Price tag: ~$200 million.
Google cofounder Larry Page and his wife, Lucy Southworth,have secured a 4.5-acre compound (and two adjacent waterfront estates) in Miami’s Coconut Grove neighborhood, a lush, bayfront area known for its privacy and walkability. Total Coconut Grove holdings: ~$188 million.
Tom Brady’s bunker on Indian Creek Island.
Peter Thiel relocated to Miami Beach’s Venetian Islands back in 2020, when he purchased two adjacent oceanfront mansions for a mere $18 million. He recently set up Thiel Capital in Miami’s Wynwood neighborhood—a vibrant, formerly industrial district now home to tech offices, startups, and art scenes.
Chamath Palihapitiya and David Friedberg argue that the personal State tax losses will be up to $20 billion annually if the exodus persists, when factoring in direct income taxes, sales taxes, real estate taxes, and economic activity from relocated staff and businesses.
Billionaire VC Jim Breyer moved to Austin, Texas, in early 2020, and has been smiling ever since.
The World’s Top VCs by personal net worth
Peter Thiel - $27.5 billion - CoFounder of PayPal and Palantir; founding partner at Founders Fund. Key tech investments include Facebook (early angel), SpaceX, and Stripe.
John Doerr - $20 billion - Partner at Kleiner Perkins. Famous for early Google investment; also backed Amazon, Intuit, and Netscape.
Mark Stevens - $10.8 billion- Former Sequoia Partner, venture capitalist, and early Google investor; associated with Sequoia Capital heritage.
Vinod Khosla - $8.3 billion - Founder of Khosla Ventures. Early backer of OpenAI; focuses on AI, sustainability, and fintech.
Douglas Leone - $8.2 billion - Global managing partner at Sequoia Capital. Led investments in ServiceNow, Nubank, and RingCentral.
Michael Moritz - $7.7 billion - Former partner at Sequoia Capital. Key Google investor; also backed PayPal, Yahoo, and LinkedIn.
Tim Draper - $3.9 billion - Founder of Draper Associates. Key investments include early bets on Hotmail (sold to Microsoft), Skype (sold to eBay), Baidu, Tesla, SpaceX, Coinbase, Robinhood, and 32,000+ Bitcoin
Jim Breyer - $3.8 billion - Founder of Breyer Capital; former Accel partner. Led early Facebook investment; also backed Etsy and Marvel.
Neil Shen - $3.5 billion - Founding managing partner at HongShan (formerly Sequoia China). Backed ByteDance (TikTok parent) and Shein.
Ben Horowitz - $3.5 billion - Co-founder of Andreessen Horowitz (a16z). Key investments in Airbnb, Coinbase, and Slack.
Marc Andreessen - $3.5 billion Co-founder of Andreessen Horowitz (a16z). Backed Instagram, GitHub, and Oculus VR.
Based on the latest available data from Forbes and other financial analyses as of early 2026.
‘The global tech industry is crazily network-dependent on California,’ observes the wealthiest VC on the planet.
‘California’s macroeconomy is pretty good, with 40 million people generating around $4 trillion in GDP. Germany generates the same GDP with 80 million people, and Japan does with three times California’s population. So California, as a whole, is working, in spite of governance that doesn’t work for a lot of the people who live there. California is like Saudi Arabia. You have a crazy religion, Wokeism, in California, and Wahhabism in Saudi Arabia, and people on the outside don’t see how these religions distort everything.
The Boogeyman broke Saudi royal protocol at the 2019 G20 summit in Osaka, Japan, by patting Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) on the shoulder as he casually walked by him.😎
And then you have oil fields in Saudi Arabia and Big Tech in California that essentially pay for everything, leading to completely bloated and inefficient government sectors and all sorts of distortions in the real estate market, where people also make lots of money. So under both models, the government and real estate are ways they redistribute their oil wealth, and California redistributes the big tech money.
It’s not the way you might want to design a system from scratch, but it’s pretty stable. People have been saying for 40 or 50 years that Saudi Arabia is ridiculous and is going to collapse any year now. But if you have a giant oil field, you can pay for a lot of ridiculousness. I think that’s the way you have to think of California.’ 🤣
The One for the highest office in the land—only in his head
California’s wildfire mismanagement has resulted in an accelerating annual average of acres burned, from 337,000 between 1979 and 1988 to 1,076,580 acres between 2021 and 2025 (4.8 million acres😳). The January 2025 Los Angeles wildfires alone destroyed ~58,000 acres, ~18,000 structures, led to ~$164 billion in property damage, forced 200,000+ home evacuations, and killed at least 31 people.
Californication is on the Presidential ballot again in ‘28
Thank God California has a great climate, stunning scenery, a 6% GDP growth rate (thank you, Silicon Valley), and remains #1 in innovation and VC investing worldwide, because everything else sucks. California ‘s pervasive homelessness, onerous regulations and taxes, infrastructure project failures, and government fraud are the worst in the nation. Unbelievable.
The term Californicationoriginated in the 1960s–1970s, first appearing in print in Time magazine in 1966 and popularized in the 1970s to describe the haphazard, mindless large-scale land development and urban sprawl that consumed much of Southern California. By the roaring 1990s, it took on a new meaning when the dark underbelly of the American Dream in Hollywood and Silicon Valley was exposed as a hopelessly superficial, status and greed-driven, hyper-sexualized, and plastic surgery and celebrity-obsessed.
🎵Psychic spies from China try to steal your mind’s elation And little girls from Sweden dream of silver screen quotation And if you want these kind of dreams it’s Californication
It’s the edge of the world and all of Western civilization The sun may rise in the East, at least it settled in a final location It’s understood that Hollywood sells Californication🎵
Ultimately, the term has come to represent the ‘exportation’ of this flawed ethos worldwide, influencing global youth culture through movies, music, and technology. We have sold the world on the idea that California is the ‘Center of the Universe,’ which, in 200 years, historians will affirm with data—for better or worse
Today’s poster child of the dark side of this movement is Gavin Newsom. A few Raps back, we predicted that JD Vance (a.k.a, ‘Mini-T’) would not be the next President of the U.S. Today, we will also predict that Gavin Newsom will not be moving into the White House either. Here’s what Californication looks like, on top of poor wildfire management:
Homelessness — California spent $24 billion in taxpayer money, and the number of people experiencing homelessness rose to 187,000. Neither the homeless nor the people who confront them in their cities every day are winning.
The failed California high-speed rail project, approved by voters with a $33 billion budget and a 2020 completion date, has ballooned to ~$135 billion with no operational track laid after more than 16 years due to chronic delays, lawsuits, permitting issues, and mismanagement.
The RCP Presidential party poll average today shows the top three Republicans are JD Vance (53%), Donald Trump Jr. (21%), and Marco Rubio (17%). For Democrats, the top three are Kamala Harris (39%) , Gavin Newsom (30%), and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (12%)
In short, for all of the reasons above, California (and Mr. Newsom’s resume) has become a notorious national symbol of government inefficiency, rampant homelessness, overregulation, runaway taxes, billions in social service fraud, cost overruns, and a ‘Sanctuary State’ run amok. In 2028, U.S. voters will say no to Californication.
Never before have we witnessed an address to European leaders, diplomats, and allies by anyone remotely associated with a Trump administration that inspired a standing ovation (and ‘sigh of relief’), but it appears that U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio hit that mark.
In his remarks, Secretary Rubio emphasized our shared cultural and spiritual heritage, rejected the idea of a ‘managed decline’ of the West, and urged allies not to be ‘shackled by guilt and shame’ over their culture.
‘In a time of headlines heralding the end of the transatlantic era, let it be known and clear to all that this is neither our goal nor our wish, because for us Americans, our home may be in the Western Hemisphere, but we will always be a child of Europe. America is charting the path for a new century of prosperity, and we want to do it together with you, our cherished allies and our oldest friends. But this will only happen with a Europe that is proud of its heritage and of its history; with a Europe that has the spirit of creation and liberty that sent ships out into uncharted seas and birthed our civilization; with a Europe that has the means to defend itself and the will to survive.’
—Marco Rubio, U.S. Secretary of State, excerpt from speech at the Munich Security Conference on February 14, 2026
Secretary Rubio’s remarks contrasts marketedly from those delivered by Mini-T (JD Vance) at the Security Conference last year. The difference between the two is why we think Mini-T doesn’t stand a chance of victory in 2028.
“I believe deeply that there is no security if you are afraid of the voices, the opinions, and the conscience that guide your very own people... If you’re running in fear of your own voters, there is nothing America can do for you. Nor, for that matter, is there anything that you can do for the American people who elected me and elected President Trump.”
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