XRP (XRP): Ripple Chair Chris Larsen Spends $10 Million Fighting California's 5% Billionaire Tax

Six Nobel Economists Back Proposition 40

Six winners of the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences endorsed California’s Proposition 40 on September 19, backing a ballot measure that would levy a one-time 5% charge on the fortunes of the state’s billionaires. The letter carries the signatures of Daron Acemoglu, Abhijit Banerjee, Peter Diamond, Esther Duflo, Paul Krugman and Joseph Stiglitz. It argues that a 5% one-time assessment on roughly 250 California billionaires would collect about $100 billion — the same take as a 5% income tax on every taxpayer in the state — and would be big enough to offset federal cuts to Medicaid. Voters take the question up on November 3, with roughly $100 billion in potential revenue hanging on the outcome.

The signatories’ case rests on concentration. California’s wealthiest 0.001% held a combined $700 billion a decade ago; the same sliver of the population now controls $2.3 trillion, a figure the letter lines up against the yearly earnings of about 20 million state taxpayers. The economists also calculate that billionaires’ state income tax worked out to just 1.6% of the $1.4 trillion they gained between 2019 and 2025 — a lower effective rate than ordinary paychecks face. The published letter calls the levy “modest relative to the gains” that billionaires have booked. Acemoglu has confronted extreme wealth before: in July he publicly dared Elon Musk to donate nearly $1 trillion by 2036, and Musk answered that he would move in that direction; Forbes currently values Musk at $946.5 billion.

For readers of XRP, Ripple’s cross-border settlement asset, the stakes are personal: the measure’s best-funded opponent is Ripple’s executive chair Chris Larsen, whose own fortune sits in the crosshairs. That collision of academic authority and crypto-founder money has turned a state ballot question into a national argument over how billionaires are taxed.

Larsen and Ripple Fund the Opposition

The opposition has been bankrolled by the fortunes the measure would tax. Chris Larsen, Ripple’s co-founder and executive chair, directed $5 million to Golden State Promise, a committee organized against Proposition 40, and Ripple Labs matched it with $5 million of corporate money. He also routed $10 million to Building a Better California, a political action committee created this year specifically to oppose the levy. The arithmetic explains the spending: Forbes values Larsen’s fortune at $8.4 billion — much of it held in XRP tokens secured by private keys — which would leave him facing roughly $420 million under a 5% assessment. A bill of that scale, settled in a single token, would test even deep liquidity pools. Taken together, the disclosed contributions from Larsen and Ripple Labs come to $20 million against the measure.

Larsen is not alone. John Doerr, the veteran venture capitalist, added $7.5 million to the same war chest. Sergey Brin, ranked the world’s fifth-richest person, relocated a sizable portion of his assets beyond California’s borders late last year, and his total spending against the tax now stands at $102 million. Building a Better California has opened a second front as well. It backs two companion initiatives, Proposition 41 and Proposition 42, and whichever measure draws more votes prevails — so either one can erase the billionaire tax even alongside a yes on Proposition 40. That gives opponents two independent paths to nullify the levy in a single election. For a company whose treasury and founder wealth are denominated in one asset, the ballot is as much a balance-sheet event as a political one. The fight lands at a busy moment for Ripple, which recently laid out its Swell 2026 conference program, a multi-day showcase for the XRP Ledger’s roadmap. Readers tracking the market in real time can follow live spot and futures prices on Bybit.

Nov. 3 Ballot in Focus

COINOTAG’s read: Proposition 40 is a founder-balance-sheet story for XRP, not a token-mechanics one. Nothing in the measure touches the XRP Ledger, where the Batch V1.1 amendment remains set for Sept. 29 activation, and on-chain accumulation has stayed firm — we recently logged XRP whale accumulation of $2.2 billion in tokens across 96 hours. The letter’s own math — $100 billion from roughly 250 fortunes — gets tested at the ballot box, not on a price chart. With no FOMO-driven repricing justified on tax headlines alone, November 3 is the date that decides Larsen’s $420 million question.