The numbers come first. David Reuben, the 88-year-old property magnate, has moved from the UK to Monaco, his spokesman confirmed. Bloomberg’s Billionaires Index values him at $13.1 billion.
Reuben and his brother Simon had been reported as non-doms. That status let them pay U.K. tax only on income earned or brought into the U.K. Britain abolished it last year. The change also brought long-term residents’ worldwide assets within reach of the country’s 40% inheritance tax.
Monaco does not levy income tax, capital gains tax, or inheritance tax. It has long served as a tax haven for London’s ultrawealthy. Reuben’s move follows that logic. Capital goes where the rules are clearer and the state takes less.
The shift also arrives with a political warning in the United States. Early voting opened this week on California’s Proposition 40, a one-time 5% levy on the state’s roughly 200 billionaires. Google cofounders, venture capitalists, and a Hollywood director have already left for Miami, Las Vegas, Austin, and New York, according to the report.
California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, has argued that billionaires can simply move to another state to avoid the tax. The state already has early returns on that argument. Six of California’s 214 billionaires were widely reported to have left before the Jan. 1, 2026 residency cutoff, including Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Peter Thiel, Don Hankey, Travis Kalanick, and Steven Spielberg.
By Fortune’s Marco Quiroz-Gutierrez’s most recent calculation, Page, Brin, Thiel, and Kalanick alone would have owed about $29 billion. That would be more than a fourth of the measure’s projected $100 billion haul. Brin has since donated $102 million to Building a Better California, the group leading the opposition, according to campaign filings cited by Fortune’s Sasha Rogelberg.
The clash is simple. Governments want more revenue. Mobile capital wants fewer surprises. When Britain raised the stakes, a billionaire left. When California raises the stakes, others are already preparing their exits.
More than a dozen billionaires worth a combined £120 billion have quit the U.K. in the two years since Labour took power, according to a new analysis of Bloomberg Billionaires Index data reported by the Evening Standard. Chancellor John Healey is now under pressure to raise revenue in his first budget on Oct. 28.
Capital rewards clear rules. Tax policy that treats wealth as a target invites a response. That response is relocation, delay, and capital preserved elsewhere. The taxpayer should not be surprised when the market has already voted.
