Billionaire Nvidia boss Jensen Huang calls paying $8 billion in California tax 'a privilege'

Jensen Huang said he would gladly pay about $8 billion under California's proposed one-time tax on billionaires, calling it a privilege in an interview with CBS News broadcast this week.

The Nvidia chief executive told correspondent Jo Ling Kent that being able to afford the bill over five years was both a privilege and a responsibility, and that he would happily pay more. "I'm not afraid of paying taxes. I'm just afraid of being poor," he said.

The measure, Proposition 40, goes before California voters on Nov. 3. It would impose a one-time 5% tax on the worldwide net worth of anyone worth $1 billion or more who lived in the state on Jan. 1, 2026, valued as of Dec. 31 and paid in instalments of 1% a year over five years. Real estate held directly is excluded.

Its backers, led by the healthcare union SEIU United Healthcare Workers West, say it would raise about $100 billion from roughly 200 people for healthcare, food assistance and public education, offsetting federal Medicaid cuts. They gathered 1.6 million signatures to put it on the ballot, nearly twice the number required. Rep. Ro Khanna and Sen. Bernie Sanders support it.

Nvidia has a single class of shares, so the roughly 3% of the company Huang owns would be valued at its market price. Founders with super-voting shares face a harder calculation, because the initiative values holdings partly by the control they carry. Bloomberg Opinion estimated that could push the effective rate for Sergey Brin, Larry Page and Mark Zuckerberg close to 20% of their fortunes.

Forbes puts Huang's fortune at $184 billion and Bloomberg at $152 billion. His $8 billion estimate sits between 5% of the two figures.

Page and Brin, two of the richest people in the world, reportedly cut ties with California before the Jan. 1 residency date, and Bloomberg Opinion reported that Zuckerberg has left or is leaving. Peter Thiel opened a Miami office for Thiel Capital, and David Sacks, now the White House's AI adviser, announced a move to Austin.

Anyone still resident on Jan. 1, 2026 owes the tax regardless of where they live afterwards, a retroactive cutoff opponents expect to be challenged in court.

Huang told Bloomberg in January that he had not thought about leaving "even once," because Nvidia's talent is in Silicon Valley. In April, sharing a Stanford stage with Khanna, he urged people to move to California despite what he called the highest taxes in the world, and he repeated the point at the Milken conference in May. Nvidia's headquarters, most of its engineers and much of its supplier base are in Santa Clara.

Huang, 63, described the tax as something he owes the country that took him in. Born in Taiwan and raised partly in Thailand, he was sent to the United States at 9, and told CBS he considers himself the ultimate American dream, crediting its schools and companies for what he has built. His first job was washing dishes at a Denny's.

In the same interview he rejected calls from Dario Amodei, Sam Altman and Elon Musk to slow AI development, saying the industry should go as fast as it can while making sure its products are safe before release.