Everyone in tech is fired up about the wealth tax. Fair enough — a proposal to tax unrealized gains is the kind of fiscal absurdity that deserves every ounce of pushback it's getting. If you work hard, build something, and watch your equity grow, the government has no business treating your paper gains like a paycheck before you've seen a single dollar.

But here's the thing Silicon Valley keeps forgetting: killing one bad bill doesn't fix California.

The wealth tax will come back. It always does. As long as Sacramento is stacked with legislators who view high earners as a revenue source rather than an economic engine, you're playing whack-a-mole with your own bank account. Defeat this version, and a tweaked successor shows up in 2027. And 2029. And so on.

The actual leverage point — the one the tech and business community keeps sleeping on — is the 2026 governor's race.

Newsom is term-limited out. The seat is genuinely open. And for the first time in a long time, there's a real conversation to be had about what California's executive leadership should look like. A governor who understands that capital formation, not capital punishment, drives the state's prosperity could reshape the regulatory and fiscal environment for a decade.

Instead, the money and the energy are going into lobbying campaigns against individual bills while the political infrastructure that produces those bills keeps humming along, totally unchallenged.

Look, we're not saying abandon the wealth tax fight. Win it. But the boardrooms and venture funds that can write six-figure checks to kill legislation should be asking a harder question: Who is actually running for governor, and why aren't we building a coalition around them right now?

California doesn't have a bad-bill problem. It has a bad-priorities-in-power problem. Fix the latter and the former starts taking care of itself.

The 2026 race won't wait for you to finish your current lobbying cycle. Start paying attention.