“Half of my Massachusetts clients over the last five years have either left or are planning to leave,” Karger says. That represents “billions of dollars in net worth and hundreds of millions of dollars in annual income.”

He — and other experts I’ve talked with — note that Massachusetts faces stiff competition from other states for tax dollars. Such moves could profoundly impact funding for schools, infrastructure, social services, and charities. And it’s part of a growing discussion about the state’s competitiveness as a place to do business, build companies, and raise a family.

Karger lives in Boston, and he’s an unabashed booster of the state: “We’ve got the best private schools. We’ve got the best public schools. We’ve got hospitals. The city of Boston is the most beautiful city in America. It’s the safest big city in America.”

But he notes that wealthy people tend to be particularly mobile. And many of his clients are “straddling,” he says. “They bought nice homes in the Bocas or the Palm Beaches or the Miamis and are starting to plan.”

Much of this planning began in late 2022, when the “millionaires tax” was approved in Massachusetts. The new law imposed an additional 4 percent tax on income over a million dollars. Since the state tax rate is 5 percent, that means that income over a million dollars would be taxed at 9 percent.

This applies not only to people who make more than a million dollars a year (the threshold for 2025 is $1,083,150), but also to someone who, in a given year, sells a $1.5 million house, even though they might only make $100,000 in salary.

And the tax comes on top of already-strict rules around wealth in Massachusetts: The estate tax is one of the heftiest in the country, kicking in for any estate worth more than $2 million. Only Oregon and Rhode Island have lower thresholds. In New York — another Democratic stronghold — the estate tax kicks in at $7.35 million. In California, there is no estate tax (though California is starting to face its own exodus of wealthy residents as it considers a wealth tax for billionaires).

New Hampshire, Karger says, has seen a large influx of wealthy folks from Massachusetts. “We have clients [who] have had homes up there and are moving up there.” And the shift to New Hampshire is part of a broader trend among Massachusetts residents: In 2024, more than 20,000 relocated up north. Meanwhile, Florida absorbed nearly 22,000 Massachusetts residents.

And that has ripple effects, Karger says. “Charity is a big, big problem. All of these nonprofits here, I see it firsthand. My clients, all of a sudden, they leave and they wind down their commitments to Children’s [Hospital] and to MGH and to the smaller local nonprofits.” Karger says he’s “very scared of this continued wallet drain.”

He understands why it might make sense to “tax the rich. They’ve made so much money.” But he notes that the rich can easily say: “Tax me all you want. I’m out.” He says he hopes “we don’t destroy the best city and best state in America. … I really hope we can figure this out.”

Florida-based entrepreneur Craig Welch, who founded a series of financial tech companies and used to live in Massachusetts, argues that “when the entrepreneurs leave, lots of other jobs leave too … I’ve started my third company in Florida, and there are right now 25, 30 employees that would’ve been in Massachusetts, and they are not going to be.”

Welch says the business landscape — including the approach to taxes — was better under Bill Weld, who was governor for much of the 1990s. But since the millionaires tax went into effect, he says, “I know four people who have left the state… And what all of them have said to me is: It’s not the tax. It’s the fact that Massachusetts is making it clear that they don’t want VCs and entrepreneurs in the state.”

Like Welch, Boston-based venture capitalist Antonio Rodriguez has witnessed an exodus of wealthy people, particularly amongst those who fund companies. Much of the exodus started during the pandemic, he argues: “When we all had our heads in the sand, government did a bunch of dumb things.”

Rodriguez, a managing partner at Matrix, believes that the millionaires tax was passed without “a really organized debate about whether it made sense in terms of innovation in Massachusetts.” People assumed that the “golden goose” — the dynamic Massachusetts ecosystem — would continue to offer up “golden eggs,” he says. “ As opposed to taking care of the goose before it dies from malnutrition.”

At the same time, companies allowed more employees to work remotely, and many workers scattered. Last year, a Massachusetts Business Roundtable report showed that more than 85 percent of midsize-to-large employers surveyed had staff affiliated with Massachusetts operations who worked remotely. And that number has only risen since 2023, despite a raft of back-to-office headlines.

Rodriguez says many of his fellow investors left, too. Younger venture capitalists “moved away because of [a] lack of deal volume,” he said. Some in the prime of their career also left, despite Rodriguez’s belief that Massachusetts is a great place to raise kids. (He cites New York City and San Francisco as places where VCs have moved.)

“The thing that scares me now,” Rodriguez says, “is that we’re in this natural period where the Silicon Valley machine is spinning really quickly with Anthropic and OpenAI and Cursor and all of these AI companies that are there. And instead of seeing some of that diffusion come back here, which would’ve been typical of prior waves, there’s no one back here to pick it up because everyone’s leaving or has left.”

In 2025, Welch, the entrepreneur, lost a high-profile court case after Massachusetts claimed he had undeclared income from the state. Welch — who lived in New Hampshire at the time — sold his $4.7 million share in a Massachusetts company he had founded about 20 years earlier. Welch argued that the shares were not awarded as income; at the time he received them, they had essentially no value. The Department of Revenue prevailed.

An investor who relocated to Florida told Rodriguez that “Massachusetts just feels ‘grabby’ for the first time.”

When it comes to tech and innovation, he says, “these geographic questions are about flywheels that start spinning. And you get enough people of a certain type, and the flywheel spins. And it’s easier for that next person to come and stay here. I think that the best thing you can have as a city or a state is a flywheel that’s unique to some source of intellectual capital or talent that is spinning really quickly.” (See the rise of biotech locally.)

He says when those flywheels “slow down — or God forbid, stop spinning altogether — then the difference between here and Milwaukee — not to pick on Milwaukee — is much less than people think.”

The question of whether the millionaires tax has been successful is controversial. The Institute for Policy Studies points to the fact that between 2022 and 2024, Massachusetts households with at least $50 million increased by more than 25 percent (from about 2,000 to about 2,600).

But during those years, the stock market also skyrocketed. It’s possible that lots of wealthy people took their tax dollars to other states, but a batch of new residents joined the $50-million-plus club. Now, the question is: What will happen to those people, their tax dollars, and the jobs they create?

Massachusetts faces a harsh reality: It isn’t about what’s fair. Without any national push to raise taxes on the wealthy, it’s a race to the bottom among states. And in order to impose its vision of fairness, our state may ultimately pay a very high price.

“Massachusetts thinks [the new tax has] been a big tailwind, and it’s got a couple billion dollars of collected revenue,” says Karger. “That’s shortsighted. They’re going to need that, because people are leaving.”

Kara Miller is the host of the podcast It Turns Out. Send comments to kara.miller@globe.com.

A Massachusetts hospital employee is facing some disturbing charges.

According to police, on Monday, Barnstable Police Detectives, with the assistance of the United States Secret Service Cyber Fraud Task Force executed a search warrant at a residence located in Marstons Mills. As a result of the search warrant and follow-up investigation, 38-year-old Scott Grella of Marstons Mills was arrested on multiple Child Pornography charges.

This search warrant and subsequent arrest was the result of a CyberTip received by the Massachusetts State Police Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force that was assigned to a task force officer from the Barnstable Police Department Investigative Services Division. The CyberTip alleged that an online account, later identified to be Grella’s, possessed and disseminated child pornography. The investigation also revealed that at least one of Grella’s digital devices contained child pornography at the time of his arrest.

Grella was arrested and then booked at the Barnstable Police Department on the charges of Possession of Child Pornography and Dissemination of Child Pornography.

He was arraigned at Barnstable District Court on Tuesday and was ordered held on $3,000 cash bail. He is scheduled for a pre-trial hearing on May 12th.

According to Boston 25 News, Grella is an employee at South Shore Hospital and has been placed on administrative leave.

The investigation remains ongoing at this time. The case is being prosecuted by the Cape & Islands District Attorney’s Office.

The product, made by the South Korean company STAR’s Tech, is called Starcrush and takes advantage of the porous nature of starfish skeletons. According to the company, the microstructure of starfish skeletons helps regulate the release of chloride from salt, reducing damage to concrete by up to 90 percent, while improving the ability to melt snow and ice by up to 66 percent. Even when you add a small amount.

Those successful results were reported during early pilots, as well as certification testing for products used on roads.

Outside testings have confirmed the efficacy of starfish. Patti Caswell, with the Oregon Department of Transportation, oversees the list of qualified products for Clear Roads, a national research consortium that does rigorous testing of road materials. STAR’s Tech topped her list in 2025, found to be 89 percent less corrosive than straight road salt.

She could not confirm whether it was also the most unusual product.

What the starfish additive is targeting is chloride — the part of salt that dissolves into water and can runoff into nearby streams and waterways. The Environmental Protection Agency sets threshold levels for chloride exposure, because it can come with consequences for the ecosystem.

Over time, runoff with high levels of chloride can stunt growth and reproduction in fish and aquatic insects, while sudden exposure can instantly kill them.

Due to storm drains that are often directly connected to bodies of water through underground pipes, anything on the street can be swept into rivers during snowmelt.

“It dramatically decreases the corrosion rate,” said STAR’s Tech founder and CEO Seungchan Yang.

Starfish may hold a quaint place in the hearts of New England beachgoers, but along the Korean Peninsula, they are, quite simply, a pest. Starfish, also known as seastars, are insatiable feeders overpopulating parts of the world. Like a tourist sidling up to a beachside clam shack, starfish will devour any shellfish within reach.

That’s true for coral reefs, too. A single Crown-of-Thorns starfish can consume roughly three-square feet of coral in a day, according to the Okinawa Institute ofScience and Technology. When outbreaks happen — as they have been in waters off South Korea — swarms with thousands of starfish can decimate a coral reef in just a few months.

Starfish also pose a problem for fishermen in South Korea, because when their nets come back filled with the five-pointed creatures, they are not legally allowed to throw them back to sea due to their impacts to the ecosystem.

Now, before you think crushing up starfish and sprinkling them on winter roads is the height of cruelty to marine invertebrates, consider the alternative. The solution in Korea has long been for the government to purchase the bycatch from fishermen and then incinerate the starfish. STAR’s Tech offers another option, taking tons of the species off the government’s hands and turning them into something useful, even after death.

By avoiding the incineration, which causes air pollution, and decreasing the amount of road repairs, STAR’s Tech claims to have further eco-friendly chops. The company has been recognized by the Korea Chamber of Commerce and Industry for its ability to cut down on greenhouse gas emissions. According to the industry group, STAR’s Tech can reduce carbon emissions by more than 22,000 tons per year — equivalent to the emissions from driving 5,178 gas-powered cars for a year, based on the EPA’s emissions equivalency calculator.

Beyond South Korea, the starfish winter road solution is in use or in pilot stages in Quebec, Mongolia, and at least one Northeastern state, which the company would not name. But it’s not Massachusetts.

So just how likely is it that we’ll see it on roads in the Bay State any time soon?

MassDOT spokesman Marshall Hook said the department is “constantly looking at alternative methods and materials.” But so far, the Korean company says it hasn’t heard back from its outreach efforts to the state.

If the state doesn’t want to sprinkle crushed up starfish on the Pike, there are other salt-additive options coming from the company. “This structure can also be derived from sea urchin,” Yang said.

Japan has an overabundance of those.

Sabrina Shankman can be reached at sabrina.shankman@globe.com.