Californians defeat Proposition 40 billionaire wealth tax
Early returns showed the measure trailing, with most ballots counted and billionaires having spent heavily to oppose it.
Californians rejected a ballot measure on Saturday that would have levied a one-time tax on billionaires' wealth, Turkey's state-run news agency Anadolu Agency reported.
The Decision Desk HQ projected that about 54 percent of voters opposed Proposition 40, while 46 percent supported it, with 76 percent of ballots counted.
The proposal would have charged billionaires a single 5 percent levy on their wealth, with most of the money going to state health programs and smaller shares to food aid and education.
The state Democratic Party, the American Federation of Labor, the Congress of Industrial Organizations and the Teamsters union backed the measure.
Governor Gavin Newsom opposed it, even though he said he supports a federal tax on billionaires.
Newsom, who is term-limited, objected that the plan would send "almost all of the revenue" to health care.
In a June Substack post, he wrote that there was "nothing for housing, nothing for childcare" in the plan.
Billionaires, many of them Silicon Valley executives, gave more than $333 million to the nonprofit Building a Better California to fight the measure.
The state's Legislative Analyst's Office estimated that the tax would have applied to about 200 billionaires and raised tens of billions of dollars.
