Business

How a Businessman Fleeing Fraud Charges Built a Life Offshore

Published

1 year ago

January 7, 2025

How a Businessman Fleeing Fraud Charges Built a Life Offshore

Around midday on Feb. 2, a large wave began its slow rumble toward the Aisland 1, an 800-ton deck barge floating in the waters between Dubai and Iran. On board the vessel were its residents of more than a year: a 58-year-old Italian businessman named Samuele Landi, three sailors, a cook and five cats.

Landi — the ship’s captain — was a gifted computer programmer who in a previous life had been the chief executive of Eutelia, a telecommunications company. He fancied himself an Italian Steve Jobs, though John McAfee, the cybersecurity entrepreneur turned tax fugitive, might have been a more fitting comparison. An avid skydiver and motorcycle racer, Landi liked to live on the edge: of the world, of the law and of life itself. He had made a career of exotic offshore financial schemes; now, adrift, he had become one with them.

“I will die at sea for sure,” he told Oswald Horowitz, a filmmaker who had visited him the previous December. “I’m not going back.”

The barge was Landi’s biggest adventure yet. A rusting rectangular hulk with the footprint of a large commercial aircraft, the Aisland had a deck fitted with six blue shipping containers bolted in place. These were the living quarters, equipped with solar-powered air-conditioners and a desalination system. The barge was otherwise littered with equipment: ropes, crates, fans, tanks of oil and water, a freezer containing pounds of red meat, and a sack of reinforced concrete mix for repairs. A Liberian flag flapped in the breeze.

The story of how Landi ended up living on a leaky barge some 30 miles off the shore of Dubai is a tale of self-preservation. For over a decade, Landi had been a man on the lam. He wasn’t a violent criminal; nor was he a particularly wanted individual, in the grand scheme of things. But since Eutelia was declared bankrupt in 2010 and some of its executives, including Landi, were very publicly tried and convicted of bankruptcy fraud, Landi has been a fugitive from Italian justice — and on land, his options had all but run out.

What distinguished Landi from a run-of-the-mill fraudster, though, was the outlandishness of his maneuvers, which exploited every loophole the globe had to offer. Landi was a libertarian who sought freedom from meddling governments and their cumbersome regulations, but in a select few nations, he found willing accomplices. Landi hid money in Switzerland, skated around extradition treaties while living comfortably in Dubai, registered companies in bespoke tax-free zones, procured diplomatic credentials from Liberia, dabbled in crypto and, finally, took to the sea, where there was no one to tell him what to do.

Landi was able to pull this off thanks to his knowledge of the offshore world, and his story makes him a perfect guide to this vast archipelago of third spaces. It also “embodies all the ways laws can be evaded through these jurisdictions, whether it’s tax laws, extradition laws, regulatory laws or taking advantage of regulatory quirks,” said Vanessa Ogle, a Yale professor working on a book about the history of the offshore world. “Once you develop a mind for it, a whole range of opportunities arises.”

While he lived on the barge, Landi was dreaming up an ambitious plan to establish a floating, modular and completely sovereign city-state in international waters near the nation of Mauritius. This much-discussed concept is known as “seasteading” — like homesteading, just wetter — and its adherents are a mix of survivalists, libertarians and wannabe pirates.

Landi’s barge was a heap, but he was able to keep it afloat in the relatively calm waters of the Persian Gulf by pumping out water and having his crew patch holes when it sprang a leak.

On that day in February, though, their repairs did not hold, and the offshore existence that Landi had built for himself was suddenly imperiled: not by the laws of nations, for once, but by the laws of nature.

Tax Shelters and a Timely Escape

As far as anyone can prove, Samuele Landi lived as a law-abiding private citizen in Arezzo, Italy, until his 30s, when he started working in the telecommunications industry. Landi’s first company, Plug It International, bought easy-to-remember phone numbers from the Italian government, then leased them out at a premium to dial-in fortune tellers, astrologers, weather reports and, of course, phone sex operators. Plug It was fined for misleading consumers about its fees.

In 2003, Plug It merged with another company to become Eutelia, a phone and internet provider. Eutelia was largely a family affair — there were Landis serving as managers and executives, Landis controlling shares and Landis expanding the business abroad. Samuele Landi, who served as Eutelia’s chief executive alongside two of his brothers, led the company as its shares began trading on the Milan Stock Exchange in 2004.

In 2006, the Italian financial police began auditing Eutelia’s books for possible fraud. The authorities discovered plenty — tens of millions of euros were improperly accounted for — and, in the process, found themselves immersed in the ways of the offshore financial world.

Starting as early as 2002, according to sentencing documents from Arezzo’s criminal court, Samuele Landi and five of his relatives had used a series of falsified or inaccurate invoices to siphon money from the business and into tax shelters around the world: a shell company on the Polynesian island of Niue; a UBS account in Monaco; a Romanian L.L.C. in Bucharest fully owned by a Swiss firm. The corporate vehicles they used had few or no employees, produced no tangible work and, according to prosecutors, existed primarily for the purpose of draining Eutelia’s coffers.

Circuitous international grifts aren’t uncommon — consider the revelations in the Panama Papers, the Paradise Papers and other data leaks that detailed how wealthy companies and individuals hide money through complex offshore entities. But Eutelia was a middling business in an ordinary Tuscan town, not a high-flying family office or a lawyered-up conglomerate with branches around the world.

Samuele Landi contested Eutelia’s insolvency. He was also antagonizing employees. In November 2009, while investigations into Eutelia were underway, employees of a Eutelia division that had been spun off occupied their offices in Rome. They camped out in their cubicles for two weeks, complaining that they hadn’t been paid in months. The workers blamed Landi — who was still in charge — for their troubles, and an image of Landi posing, pirate-style, with a cartoon-villain expression and a cutlass between his teeth became a symbol for Eutelia’s misdeeds.

Landi hit back in a manner more befitting a mob boss than a telecom executive. With 15 private guards by his side, he marched into the offices at 5 a.m. one November day, aiming to disrupt the sit-in. Wielding crowbars, the men dragged the workers out of the offices and into the lobby. A television reporter covering the occupation then called the police, who took Landi and his men away.

By the time Eutelia’s court date came around, Landi had high-tailed it for Dubai. At the time, the city-state levied no taxes on foreign citizens, had no extradition agreement with Italy and was developing a reputation as a place where criminals — and their money — could find safe haven.

These accommodations allowed Landi to establish himself quietly in the United Arab Emirates, and to move his wife and their children there.

In the city full of expatriates, Landi blended in. Professionally, he picked up where he had left off. In 2010, he registered Kryptotel, an encrypted mobile-phone software company, in Internet City, one of Dubai’s many free economic zones — gated enclaves where foreign companies enjoy special perks.

At Kryptotel, Landi hired Italians — among them, an old skydiving pal, according to LinkedIn. Commenting on a Facebook thread about his exploits, Landi wrote that he had sought out clients who could pay him in cryptocurrencies and would convert the digital currencies into dollars or dirhams when he needed cash.

Landi clearly had access to funds, though how much of the Eutelia loot ended up in his pockets and for how long was not clear. In the sentencing document, Italian prosecutors noted that Landi previously had access to accounts at the Banca della Svizzera Italiana in Lugano and Julius Baer, a Swiss private bank that reached a half-billion-dollar settlement in 2016 with the United States for helping rich Americans avoid tax. Additionally, Landi had power of attorney over a bank vault and other accounts.

Whatever his net worth, it was enough for a $10,000-a-month villa, a driver and car, private school for his children and trips abroad for his family.

From his villa in Dubai’s Palm Jumeirah, an archipelago of man-made islands, Landi followed the news as lawsuits against him, his family members and other Eutelia executives made their way through the Italian courts. In 2015, Arezzo’s criminal court sentenced Landi’s uncle, cousin and brother to between two and four and a half years in prison for fraudulent bankruptcy and misappropriation of funds. Their appeals failed, and the uncle died in 2016. Two other brothers took plea bargains. The surviving Landis served their time mostly under house arrest because they had no prior convictions, according to a prosecutor.

Samuele Landi’s exit, which made headlines back home, had caused tension within the family, said Paolo Casalini, a friend of Landi’s and a former editor of a local news site, Informarezzo.com, which Landi bought and took over in July 2022. “His brothers didn’t even talk to him anymore,” said Casalini, who was in regular touch with Landi over the years.

(Landi’s wife and sons did not respond to requests for comment; neither did the family members named in the lawsuits. His eldest daughter sent a brief statement saying her father was “a really kind person.”)

Samuele Landi was sentenced to a total of 14 years in prison in absentia for his role in Eutelia’s insolvency, but in Dubai, he was untouchable. There were hometown rumors that he had been arrested in 2017, but Casalini said Landi shrugged them off by sending a photo of himself on the beach, reading the newspaper: “Landi felt safe in Dubai,” Casalini said.

I asked if Landi seemed to miss Arezzo.

“He would say no,” Casalini said. “He said, ‘I’d only come back here for my mother.’”

The Perks of Diplomatic Immunity

On March 22, 2022, Liberia’s president, George Weah, landed in Dubai for a diplomatic visit. At the terminal, a delegation of Liberian officials was there to greet him. Standing a good half-foot taller than his peers was a man with a shiny, white, bald head: Samuele Landi.

Landi was there in his capacity as Liberia’s honorary consul general to Dubai. He had found yet another loophole. This appointment by Liberia — a country he was never a resident of and to which he had no connection by blood or marriage — had effectively granted him immunity from prosecution in Dubai by making him a diplomatic envoy.

He had made his first inroads in Liberia during his Eutelia days, when the firm bought a 60 percent stake worth $21 million in a Monrovia company called Netcom Liberia. For an offshore man of mystery and ill repute, a diplomatic post is a protective cloak that brings with it varying degrees of immunity, not to mention an alternative passport to travel and transact with; a new identity untethered from the past; and a noble (honorable, even) foil.

In the offshore world, this is a “time-honored strategy” going back to the 1920s, Vanessa Ogle, the historian, said. “Honorary consuls can move assets across borders,” she said. “They can have cars with diplomatic plates, the immunity and privilege of not being searched and a diplomatic pouch” to conceal documents. In 2022, the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists found 500 current and former honorary consuls had been accused of crimes or embroiled in controversy.

Many honorary consul gigs are just for show. Not Landi’s. According to three people who spent time with Landi in Dubai, he threw himself into the job, soliciting funds from wealthy Arab donors to build a hospital near Monrovia and hosting a Liberian Independence Day party at his home. He even used his consular powers to help repatriate over dozens of Liberian domestic workers who had been trafficked into Oman. (Alieu Massaquoi, Liberia’s ambassador to the United Arab Emirates, said in a WhatsApp message that he had not met Landi in person and that his office had no record of him. Massaquoi was appointed to his post in 2023, after Landi had moved offshore.)

Landi also used his time in Dubai to consult for a start-up run by an Emirati sheikh. The company, Blue Carbon, made plans to buy up large areas of Liberian forest to offset carbon emissions.

In May 2022, after a Liberian businessman in the United States was apprehended with a fake diplomatic credential, Liberia declared it would recall all of its diplomatic passports. That summer, the Emirates extradited an Italian drug trafficker and mobster who had been living in Dubai for years.

At this point, Landi mapped out his next move: one that took him offshore not just in a metaphorical sense, but in a physical one, too.

The Final Frontier

Landi surprised almost everybody when he moved onto the Aisland 1 on Dec. 22, 2022, with a stray cat and four kittens he had found in a box. His colleagues and friends knew nothing of his plans.

“He wanted to keep his barge a surprise,” said Casalini, who learned of Landi’s move after he posted about it online. “I’m a calm person, but my response was, ‘Are you mad?’”

It was a reasonable question. Landi had begun cryptically speaking, in interviews, about wanting to “escape the Matrix” — a metaphor from the 1999 movie for letting go of constructed social norms and false beliefs.

“He believed we live in a world where we are always being surveilled and manipulated — by 5G, by the Covid vaccines,” said Clément Bonnerot, a journalist with Le Monde who had interviewed Landi while he was at sea. “He identified as a hunted, persecuted man, for whom the most important thing was to be free.”

In December 2023, he told Tony Olsen, a libertarian podcaster: “If you are libertarian like we are, you want your freedom. And your freedom is finished when the freedom of others starts. This is the key point.”

Landi was adept at living at sea. He grew vegetables and made plans to bring aboard chickens and cattle. He wrote a blog, extolling the barge’s lack of mosquitoes and the stunning sunsets and posted lighthearted articles about his adventures. (These have all since been taken down.) He relied on his crew, on semiregular deliveries of food and supplies from Dubai and on his Starlink satellite connection, which allowed him to keep Kryptotel, his cellphone company, in business.

Still, Landi had no illusions about the longevity of his setup. “For the moment,” he told Olsen, the podcaster, from one of his blue containers, Dubai “is tolerating us, but we cannot stay.”

The used barge, which he said he had bought for $200,000, was falling apart, too, to the point that Landi and his men had to teach themselves aquatic welding. “From inside, there are certain dangers because you are exposed to gas,” he told Olsen. “But if you weld from outside, it’s more difficult because you’re in a scuba diving suit fighting the current and waves.”

On land, in the world of nation-states, Landi had reached the end of the line. And that little voice that had led him far from home, under fictitious flags, to inhabit man-made isles and extraterritorial havens, was now telling him to construct a nation of his own.

He would buy a new barge, twice as large, that he would anchor in the Saya de Malha Bank, midway between Seychelles and Mauritius. He would invite friends, family and like-minded libertarians to join him.

Landi even had an architect draw up plans. “On the top deck, he needed a spot where a Gatling gun was going to be mounted,” said Peter de Vries, a designer. “That’s one of these guns that fires 1,000 rounds a minute — very heavy-duty stuff,” he continued. “I actually got the specs for the gun.”

I asked de Vries: Was Landi scared of pirates, the state, his personal enemies?

“Probably all of the above,” de Vries replied. “The world.”

Nevertheless, Landi seemed as cheerful as ever. In footage that Oswald Horowitz, the filmmaker, took late in late 2023, Landi cuts the figure of a self-actualized man. His skin is not so much sunburned as glowing, his laugh is mirthful, and his demeanor determined and a little droll, as though he saw the humor in his predicament.

His endeavor might sound like lunacy to most people — a country, on a barge, in international waters, with guns? — but for a veteran of offshore affairs like Landi, it adhered to a certain logic.

The universe in which Landi had sought shelter is not so exceptional, after all. In fact, it is all around us, hiding in plain sight. We might buy a bottle of Scotch in a duty-free shop, or vacation on a cruise ship with Panama’s or Liberia’s lightly regulated flag of convenience. We might gamble in a casino or admire a da Vinci that has spent decades in an extraterritorial warehouse. Our clothes, our electronics, the computers we use for our desk jobs are likely to have been manufactured in special economic zones by global companies that behave more or less like Samuele Landi: hopping from jurisdiction to jurisdiction in order to make money and shield themselves as best they can from fiscal, regulatory, legal or environmental responsibilities.

Landi turned this ethos into a lifestyle. On the run, he made a life in the spaces above, beneath and between nations

Landi sent his last message to Horowitz on New Year’s Eve. It read: “Move or die.”

A month later, Landi’s barge was around 30 miles from the Dubai coast when the rogue wave hit, breaching the hull and apparently breaking the barge in two. Two members of Landi’s crew survived by clinging onto pieces of wood until a passing vessel rescued them the next day. Landi and the two remaining seafarers were not so lucky.

According to Italian news reports, Landi put out a call for help, but it didn’t come in time.

His body was found several days later, when it washed up on the beach about 40 miles up the coastline from Dubai. A relative flew out to identify the body.

In the seasteading community, Landi is remembered as a heroic figure. “Samuele Landi was the first seasteader to live in international waters for more than a year,” Joe Quirk, the president of the Seasteading Institute, a California nonprofit, wrote in an email. But the organization declined to endorse or recommend his exploits. “Barges,” Quirk wrote, “are not safe.”

Back in Arezzo, not everyone is convinced that Samuele Landi is deceased; rumors swirl about the lack of DNA evidence, and even the city’s mayor can’t quite believe that Arezzo’s most notorious exile is gone.

This was a man who found his way around everything: rules, taxes, borders, the law. Surely, Samuele Landi would resurface.

Sabika Shah Povia contributed reporting.

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Business

Abandoned shops and missing customers: Fire-scarred businesses are still stuck in the aftermath

Published

6 hours ago

January 9, 2026

Press Room

Abandoned shops and missing customers: Fire-scarred businesses are still stuck in the aftermath

The charred remains of the historic Pacific Palisades Business Block cast a shadow over a once-bustling shopping district along West Sunset Boulevard.

Empty lots littered with debris and ash line the street where houses and small businesses once stood. A year since the Palisades fire roared through the neighborhood, only a handful of businesses have reopened.

The Starbucks, Bank of America, and other businesses that used to operate in the century-old Business Block are gone. All that remains of the Spanish Colonial Revival building are some arches surrounding what used to be a busy retail space. The burned-out, rusty remnants of a walk-in vault squat in the center of the structure.

Nearby, the Shade Store, the Free-est clothing store, Skin Local spa, a Hastens mattress store, Sweet Laurel Bakery and the Hydration Room are among the many stores still shuttered. Local barbershop Gornik & Drucker doesn’t know if it can reopen.

“We have been going back and forth on what it would take to survive,” co-owner Leslie Gornik said. “If we open, we have to start over from scratch.”

Hundreds gathered around Business Block on the anniversary of he fire on Wednesday to witness a military-style white-glove ceremony to pay respects to the families who lost loved ones. Photos of those killed from the neighborhood were placed at the Palisades Village Green next door.

The Palisades fire burned for 24 days, destroying more than 6,800 structures, damaging countless others and forcing most of the neighborhood’s residents to move elsewhere. About 30 miles northeast, the Eaton fire burned more than 9,400 structures. Combined, the fires killed 31 people.

Remnants of the the Pacific Palisades Business Block, which was completed in 1924 and burned in the Palisades fire.

The few businesses that are back in Palisades serve as a beacon of hope for the community, but owners and managers say business is down and customers haven’t returned.

Ruby Nails & Spa, located near the Business Block, was closed for eight months before reopening in September. Now business is only half of what it was before the fires, owner Ruby Hong-Tran said.

“People come back to support but they live far away now,” she said. “All my clients, their houses burned.”

Ruby Hong-Tran, owner of Ruby Nails & Spa in Pacific Palisades, says her business is half of what it was since reopening.

It took months to clean all the smoke damage from her shop. The front is still being fixed to cover up burn damage.

The firestorms destroyed swaths of other neighborhoods, including Malibu, Topanga, Sierra Madre and Altadena, where businesses and homeowners also are struggling to build back.

Some are figuring out whether it is worth rebuilding. Some have given up.

The Los Angeles Economic Development Corporation estimated last year that more than 1,800 small businesses were in the burn zones in Pacific Palisades, Malibu and Altadena, impacting more than 11,000 jobs.

Businesses say they often have been on their own. The Federal Emergency Management Agency tasked the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to clean up debris at private residences, some public buildings and places of worship — but not commercial properties.

Business owners had to clean up the charred debris and toxic waste on their properties. Many had to navigate complicated insurance claims and apply for emergency loans to stay afloat.

Rosie Maravilla, general manager of Anawalt’s Palisades Hardware, said damage to her store was limited, and insurance covered the cleaning, so she was able to open quickly. The store reopened just one month after the fire.

Rosie Maravilla, general manager of Anawalt Palisades Hardware, in front of of the store in Pacific Palisades.

Still, sales are 35% lower than what they used to be.

“In the early days, it was bad. We weren’t making anything,” Maravilla said. “We’re lucky the company kept us employed.”

The customer base has changed. Instead of homeowners working on personal projects, the store is serving contractors working on rebuilding in the area.

An archival image of the area in Pacific Palisades hangs over the aisles in Anawalt Palisades Hardware.

Across the street from the Business Block, the Palisades Village mall was spared the flames and looks pristine, but is still closed. Shop windows are covered with tarps. Low metal gates block entry to the high-end outlets. The mall is still replacing its drywall to eliminate airborne contaminants that the fire could have spread.

All of its posh shops still are shut: Erewhon, Lululemon ,Bay Theater, Blue Ribbon Sushi, athletic apparel store Alo, Buck Mason men’s and Veronica Beard women’s boutiques.

Mall owner and developer Rick Caruso said he is spending $60 million to reopen in August.

The need to bring back businesses impacted by the fires is urgent, Caruso said, and not just to support returning residents.

“It’s critical to bring jobs back and also for the city to start creating some tax revenue to support city services,” he said. ”Leaders need to do more to speed up the rebuilding process, such as speeding up the approval of building permits and stationing building inspectors closer to burn areas.”

Pedestrians walk past the Erewhon market in Palisades Village that plans to reopen this year.

Wednesday, on the anniversary of the fire, Caruso sent three light beams into the sky over the mall, which met in one stream to honor the impacted communities of Pacific Palisades, Altadena and Malibu.

The nighttime display will continue through Jan. 31.

Business Block’s history dates to 1924, when it served as a home for the community’s first ventures. In the 1980s, plans to tear it down and build a mall sparked a local uprising to save the historic symbol of the neighborhood’s vibrancy. It was designated a Los Angeles Historic-Cultural Monument in 1984.

Tiana Noble, a Starbucks spokesperson, said the landlord terminated the company’s lease when the building burned down. Bank of America said it secured a new lease to rebuild nearby.

Business Block’s fate is still unclear. Some people want to preserve its shell and turn it into a memorial.

This week, it was ringed by a fence emblazoned with the words “Empowering fresh starts together.”

Caruso said the ruins should be torn down.

“It needs to be demolished and cleaned up,” he said. “It’s an eyesore right now and a hazard. I would put grass on it and make it attractive to the community.”

Twisted and scorched remnants of the the Pacific Palisades Business Block still are there a year after the fire.

A short walk from the Business Block and near a burned-down Ralphs grocery store is the Palisades Garden Cafe, one of the few places in the neighborhood to get food and drink. The small, vibrant cafe was closed for two months after the fire, during which the employees went without pay.

Manager Lita Rodriguez said business is improving, but misses the regulars.

“We used to get tons of students and teachers who live and work here,” she said. “Our customers are mostly contractors now.”

Business

California led the nation in job cuts last year, but the pace slowed in December

Published

18 hours ago

January 9, 2026

Press Room

California led the nation in job cuts last year, but the pace slowed in December

Buffeted by upheavals in the tech and entertainment industries, California led the nation in job cuts last year — but the pace of layoffs slowed sharply in December both in the state and nationwide as company hiring plans picked up.

State employers announced just 2,739 layoffs in December, well down from the 14,288 they said they would cut in November.

Still, with the exception of Washington, D.C., California led all states in 2025 with 175,761 job losses, according to a report from outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas.

The slowdown in December losses was experienced nationwide, where U.S.-based employers announced 35,553 job cuts for the month. That was down 50% from the 71,321 job cuts announced in November and down 8% from the 38,792 job cuts reported the same month last year.

That amounted to good news in a year that saw the nation’s economy suffer through 1.2 million layoffs — the most since the economic destruction caused by the pandemic, which led to 2.3 million job losses in 2020, according to the report.

“The year closed with the fewest announced layoff plans all year. While December is typically slow, this coupled with higher hiring plans, is a positive sign after a year of high job cutting plans,” Andy Challenger, a workplace expert at the firm, said in a statement.

The California economy was lashed all year by tumult in Hollywood, which has been hit by a slowdown in filming as well as media and entertainment industry consolidation.

Meanwhile, the advent of artificial intelligence boosted capital spending in Silicon Valley at the expense of jobs, though Challenger said the losses were also the result of “overhiring over the last decade.”

Workers were laid off by the thousands at Intel, Salesforce, Meta, Paramount, Walt Disney Co. and elsewhere. Apple even announced its own rare round of cuts.

The 75,506 job losses in technology California experienced last year dwarfed every other industry, according to Challenger’s data. It attributed 10,908 of the cuts to AI.

Entertainment, leisure and media combined saw 17,343 announced layoffs.

The losses pushed the state’s unemployment rate up a tenth of a point to 5.6% in September, the highest in the nation aside from Washington, D.C., according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data released in December.

September also marked the fourth straight month the state lost jobs, though they only amounted to 4,500 in September, according to the bureau data.

Nationally, Washington, D.C., took the biggest jobs hits last year due to Elon Musk’s initiative to purge the federal workforce. The district’s 303,778 announced job losses dwarfed those of California, though there none reported for December.

The government sector led all industries last year with job losses of 308,167 nationwide, while technology led in private sector job cuts with 154,445. Other sector with losses approaching 100,000 were warehousing and retail.

Despite the attention focused on President Trump’s tariffs regime, they were only cited nationally for 7,908 job cuts last year, with none announced in December.

New York experienced 109,030 announced losses, the second most of any state. Georgia was third at 80,893.

These latest figures follow a report from the Labor Department this week that businesses and government agencies posted 7.1 million open jobs at the end of November, down from 7.4 million in October. Layoffs also dropped indicating the economy is experiencing a “low-hire, low-fire” job market.

At the same time, the U.S. economy grew at an 4.3% annual rate in the third quarter, surprising economists with the fastest expansion in two years, as consumer and government spending, as well as exports, grew. However, the government shutdown, which halted data collection, may have distorted the results.

Still, December’s announced hiring plans also were positive. Last month, employers nationwide said they would hire 10,496 employees, the highest total for the month since 2022 when they announced plans to hire 51,693 workers, Challenger said.

The December plans contrasted sharply with the 12-month figure. Last year, U.S. employers announced they would hire 507,647 workers, down 34% from 2024.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Business

Commentary: Yes, California should tax billionaires’ wealth. Here’s why

Published

1 day ago

January 8, 2026

Press Room

Commentary: Yes, California should tax billionaires’ wealth. Here’s why

That shrill, high-pitched squeal you’ve been hearing lately? Don’t bother trying to adjust your TV or headphones, or calling your doctor for a tinnitis check. It’s just America’s beleaguered billionaires keening over a proposal in California to impose a one-time wealth tax of up to 5% on fortunes of more than $1 billion.

The billionaires lobby has been hitting social media in force to decry the proposed voter initiative, which has only started down the path toward an appearance on November’s state ballot. Supporters say it could raise $100 billion over five years, to be spent mostly on public education, food assistance and California’s medicaid program, which face severe cutbacks thanks to federal budget-cutting.

As my colleagues Seema Mehta and Caroline Petrow-Cohen report, the measure has the potential to become a political flash point.

The rich will scream The pundits and editorial-board writers will warn of dire consequences…a stock market crash, a depression, unemployment, and so on. Notice that the people making such objections would have something personal to lose.

— Donald Trump advocating a wealth tax, in 2000

Its well-heeled critics include Jessie Powell, co-founder of the Bay Area-based crypto exchange platform Kraken, who warned on X that billionaires would flee the state, taking with them “all of their spending, hobbies, philanthropy and jobs.”

Venture investor Chamath Palihapitiya claimed on X that “$500 billion in wealth has already fled the state” but didn’t name names. San Francisco venture investor Ron Conway has seeded the opposition coffers with a $100,000 contribution. And billionaire Peter Thiel disclosed on Dec. 31 that he has opened a new office in Miami, in a state that not only has no wealth tax but no income tax.

Already Gov. Gavin Newsom, a likely candidate for the Democratic nomination for president, has warned against the tax, arguing that it’s impractical for one state to go it alone when the wealthy can pick up and move to any other state to evade it.

On the other hand. Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Fremont), usually an ally of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, supports the measure: “It’s a matter of values,” he posted on X. “We believe billionaires can pay a modest wealth tax so working-class Californians have Medicaid.”

Not every billionaire has decried the wealth tax idea. Jensen Huang, the CEO of the soaring AI chip company Nvidia — and whose estimated net worth is more than $160 billion — expressed indifference about the California proposal during an interview with Bloomberg on Tuesday.

“We chose to live in Silicon Valley and whatever taxes, I guess, they would like to apply, so be it,” he said. “I’m perfectly fine with it. It never crossed my mind once.”

And in 2000, another plutocrat well known to Americans proposed a one-time tax of 14.25% on taxpayers with a net worth of $10 million or more. That was Donald Trump, in a book-length campaign manifesto titled “The America We Deserve.”

“The rich will scream,” Trump predicted. “The pundits and editorial-board writers will warn of dire consequences … a stock market crash, a depression, unemployment, and so on. Notice that the people making such objections would have something personal to lose.” (Thanks due to Tim Noah of the New Republic for unearthing this gem.)

Trump’s book appeared while he was contemplating his first presidential campaign, in which he presented himself as a defender of the ordinary American. His ghostwriter, Dave Shiflett, later confessed that he regarded the book as “my first published work of fiction.”

All that said, let’s take a closer look at the proposed initiative and its backers’ motivation. It’s gaining nationwide attention because California has more billionaires than any other state.

The California measure’s principal sponsor, the Service Employees International Union, and its allies will have to gather nearly 875,000 signatures of registered voters by June 24 to reach the ballot. The opposition is gearing up behind the catchphrase “Stop the Squeeze” — an odd choice for a rallying cry, since it’s hard to imagine the average voter getting all het up about multibillionaires getting squoze.

The measure would exempt directly held real estate, pensions and retirement accounts from the calculation of net worth. The tax can be paid over five years (with a fee charged for deferrals). It applies to billionaires residing in California as of Jan. 1, 2026; their net worth would be assessed as of Dec. 31 this year. The measure’s drafters estimate that about 200 of the wealthiest California households would be subject to the tax.

The initiative is explicitly designed to claw back some of the tax breaks that billionaires received from the recent budget bill passed by the Republican-dominated Congress and signed on July 4 by President Trump. The so-called One Big Beautiful Bill Act will funnel as much as $1 trillion in tax benefits to the wealthy over the next decade, while blowing a hole in state and local budgets for healthcare and other needs.

California will lose about $19 billion a year for Medi-Cal alone. According to the measure’s drafters, that could mean the loss of Medi-Cal coverage for as many as 1.6 million Californians. Even those who retain their eligibility will have to pay more out of pocket due to provisions in the budget bill.

The measure’s critics observe that wealth taxes have had something of a checkered history worldwide, although they often paint a more dire picture than the record reflects. Twelve European countries imposed broad-based wealth taxes as recently as 1995, but these have been repealed by eight of them.

According to the Tax Foundation Europe, that leaves wealth taxes in effect only in Colombia, Norway, Spain and Switzerland. But that’s not exactly correct. Wealth taxes still exist in France and Italy, where they’re applied there to real estate as property taxes, and in Belgium, where they’re levied on securities accounts valued at more than 1 million euros, or about $1.16 million.

Switzerland’s wealth tax is by far the oldest, having been enacted in 1840. It’s levied annually by individual cantons on all residents, at rates reaching up to about 1% of net worth, after deductions and exclusions for certain categories of assets.

The European countries that repealed their wealth taxes did so for varied reasons. Most were responding at least partially to special pleading by the wealthy, who threatened to relocate to friendlier jurisdictions in a continent-wide low-tax contest.

That’s the principal threat raised by opponents of the California proposal. But there are grounds to question whether the effect would be so stark. For one thing, notes UC Berkeley economist Gabriel Zucman, an advocate of wealth taxes generally, “it has become impossible to avoid the tax by leaving the state.” Billionaires who hadn’t already established residency elsewhere by Jan. 1 this year have missed a crucial deadline.

The initiative’s drafters question the assumption that millionaires invariably move from high- to low-tax jurisdictions, citing several studies, including one from 2016 based on IRS statistics showing that elites are generally unwilling to move to exploit tax advantages across state lines.

As for the argument that billionaires could avoid the tax by moving assets out of the state, “the location of the assets doesn’t matter,” Zucman told me by email. “Taxpayers would be liable for the tax on their worldwide assets.”

One issue raised by the burgeoning controversy over the California proposal is how to extract a fair share of public revenue from plutocrats, whose wealth has surged higher while their effective tax rates have declined to historically low levels.

There can be no doubt that in tax terms, America’s wealthiest families make out like bandits. The total effective tax rate of the 400 richest U.S. households, according to an analysis by Zucman, his UC Berkeley colleague Emmanuel Saez, and their co-authors, “averaged 24% in 2018-2020 compared with 30% for the full population and 45% for top labor income earners.” This is largely due to the preferences granted by the federal capital gains tax, which is levied only when a taxable asset is sold and even then at a lower rate than the rate on wage income.

The late tax expert at USC, Ed Kleinbard, used to describe the capital gains tax as our only voluntary tax, since wealthy families can avoid selling their stocks and bonds indefinitely but can borrow against them, tax-free, for funds to live on; if they die before selling, the imputed value of their holdings is “stepped up” to their value at their passing, extinguishing forever what could be decades of embedded tax liabilities. (The practice has been labeled “buy, borrow, die.”)

Californians have recently voted to redress the increasing inequality of our tax system. Voters approved what was dubbed a “millionaires tax” in 2012, imposing a surcharge of 1% to 3% on incomes over $263,000 (for joint filers, $526,000). In 2016, voters extended the surcharge to 2030 from the original phase-out date of 2016. That measure passed overwhelmingly, by a 2-to-1 majority, easily surpassing that of the original initiative.

But it may be that California’s ability to tax billionaires’ income has been pretty much tapped out. Some have argued that one way to obtain more revenue from wealthy households is to eliminate any preferential rate on capital gains and other investment income, but that’s not an option for California, since the state doesn’t offer a preferential tax rate on that income, unlike the federal government and many other states. The unearned income is taxed at the same rate as wages.

One virtue of the California proposal is that, even if it fails to get enacted or even to reach the ballot, it may trigger more discussion of options for taxing plutocratic fortunes. One suggestion came from hedge fund operator Bill Ackman, who reviled the California proposal on X as “an expropriation of private property” (though he’s not a California resident himself), but acknowledged that “one shouldn’t be able to live and spend like a billionaire and pay no tax.”

Ackman’s idea is to make loans backed by stock holdings taxable, “as if you sold the same dollar amount of stock as the loan amount.” That would eliminate the free ride that investors can enjoy by borrowing against their holdings.

The debate over the California wealth tax may well hinge on delving into plutocrat psychology. Will they just pay the bill, as Huang implies would be his choice? Or relocate from California out of pique?

California is still a magnet for the ambitious entrepreneur, and the drafters of the initiative have tried to preserve its allure. Those who come into the state after Jan. 1 to pursue their ambitious dreams of entrepreneurship would be exempt, as would residents whose billion-dollar fortunes came after that date. There may be better ways for California to capture more revenue from the state’s population of multibillionaires, but a one-time limited tax seems, at this moment, to be as good as any.