California’s 2026 election has been the year of the billionaire.
For months, a small handful of very, very wealthy people deployed their vast resources in unprecedented sums up and down the ballot. And while their spending drew widespread attention, a new analysis by POLITICO — which, like Business Insider, is part of the Axel Springer Global Reporters Network — offers a more revealing look at their party affiliations and voting habits.
Some have made their politics abundantly clear.
Tom Steyer, the billionaire philanthropist, attempted this year to buy his way to the governor’s mansion with an ultimately unsuccessful $200-plus million primary campaign.
SEIU-UHW’s pursuit of Proposition 40, a one-time tax on the state’s wealthiest residents, put billionaires on the ballot explicitly, prompting a more than $300 million opposition campaign led by Sergey Brin, one of the world’s richest men, who is now positioned to act as a political powerbroker for years to come.
A separate billionaire, surgeon and inventor Gary Michelson, spent tens of millions of his personal fortune to promote his own measure, an immunology bond that would direct billions to an institute that he co-founded. Across the entire ballot, current and former California billionaires have spent a record $612 million on this year’s state election.
For years, the country’s richest people have wielded a growing influence on the direction and outcome of its politics. In California, this year has supercharged that trendline. But who, in fact, are they?
More than 250 billionaires call California home — or have until recently — according to Forbes. POLITICO was able to match 166 of those individuals with the state’s voter file, offering new insights into their make-up, political leanings and voting propensity.
Many of the state’s billionaires’ names are familiar to the average voter, representing the state’s major industries of entertainment and tech — music icons like Dr. Dre and Rihanna, reality TV stars like Kim Kardashian as well as Silicon Valley tech moguls like Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Anthropic founder Dario Amodei and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt (not to be confused with Eric Smidt, the billionaire CEO of Harbor Freight tools).
Others run their businesses in relative anonymity — Donald Friese, the former owner of a glass and glazing products company, and James Scapa, the founder of a software firm Altair Engineering, are unlikely to turn many heads when they walk down the street.
According to POLITICO’s analysis, registered Democrats outnumbered Republicans among the billionaires we identified to the California voter file, despite the number of industrial titans who have visited the White House and extended olive branches to President Donald Trump.
“Voters probably think there are more Republicans” among California’s billionaire class, said Paul Mitchell, a Democratic leading political data expert in California. “That’s more recency bias when you see all the tech elites around the table with Trump.”
Republican consultant Mike Murphy said the numbers challenge the assumption that wealthy people are overwhelmingly Republican.
“The old model of politics equates wealth with Republican so people probably assume they’ve all got to be Republican if they’re billionaires,” he said, “and I think the data shows it’s more complex than that.”
Zuckerberg, who has met with Trump on a number occasions and has undergone what some have termed a “MAGA-makeover,” was listed as a registered Democrat, according to voter-file data the Secretary of State’s office provided in early September. Amodei, another frequent guest of the White House, was also listed as a registered Democrat, as was his AI rival, Sam Altman. Headlining California’s class of Republican billionaires that POLITICO identified in the voter file are former Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, Golden State Warriors and Golden State Valkyries owner Joe Lacob and Trump mega donor and tech entrepreneur Palmer Luckey.
But the billionaires were still less Democratic than their state’s overall electorate (36% of the billionaires POLITICO matched to the voter file, compared to 45% of the statewide electorate). And they were more likely to have no party preference (39%, compared to 23% of voters statewide). Mitchell said that could reflect a prevailing disdain for the two-party political system.
“One train of thought for a (no-party-preference voter) is: ‘I don’t know anything about politics, I don’t care, I’m just independent.’ The other is: ‘I’m smarter than these parties, I know what I want,'” Mitchell said. “I’m sure a lot of these billionaires fit into that camp.”
Unsurprisingly, Los Angeles and San Francisco are the clear geographic centers of power among the billionaire set. More than 30 people were registered in San Francisco itself and another 15 in Los Angeles, with dozens more in the surrounding cities and suburbs. At least a quarter were born in the state, followed by 8% in New York, and at least 19% in other countries.
While billionaires have seized an outsized role in the state’s politics this year, they are also generally high-propensity voters. More than 60% of the billionaires in our dataset voted in each of the last three presidential elections, a higher share than the statewide electorate in both 2024 and 2016. But although generally more engaged than the average voter, just 54% voted in last November’s special election and an even lower 51% in the 2024 presidential primaries.
At least some billionaires have already attempted to flee California over the wealth tax. If Prop 40 passes, opponents say, they may not be the last.
This story originally appeared on POLITICO and is courtesy of the Axel Springer Global Reporters Network, which harnesses the resources of the company’s newsrooms to publish ambitious scoops, investigations, interviews, opinion pieces, and analysis. It allows journalists — including those from POLITICO, Business Insider, WELT, BILD, Onet, and Fakt — to collaborate on major stories for an international audience of hundreds of millions across platforms.
