OnJanuary 8th, an anonymous buyer shelled out $21 million for a 5,000-square-foot luxury penthouse at the swank Summit Club just outside Las Vegas, the most ever paid for a condo in the area. The buyer was longtime Los Angeles billionaire Don Hankey, who tells Forbes exclusively that the reason behind his high-price purchase was California’s new proposed 5% billionaire wealth tax.
“It’s ridiculous,” says Hankey, phoning from his new digs in the Silver State. “We’ve already lost a lot of wealthy people and a lot of good companies that have been moving out of California. This is just going to continue the trend.”
Hankey, 82, had lived in California all his life and had built his Hankey Group financial services empire there since 1972. But he says he read about the proposed new tax this fall and by December was looking for property in Nevada, where he already has an office building. He ended up with a five-bedroom spread atop a country club, with sweeping views of the desert and a private lap pool. He bought the condo fully furnished, including art and silverware, allowing him to move in right away.
The timing is key. The bill—which needs some 900,000 signatures to get on the ballot, then would have to win at the polls and overcome any legal challenges—would apply a one-time, 5% tax to nearly all assets held by every billionaire who was a resident of California on January 1, 2026. The hope is to raise around $100 billion to fund healthcare and education programs. Most billionaires would owe at least $100 million, with one owing more than $13 billion, according to a Forbes analysis. Hankey, who is worth an estimated $8.2 billion, would be on the hook for around $400 million if he’s considered a California resident. He thinks he got out just in time, beginning the process of buying the condo in December.
“I just felt a little bit like I wasn’t wanted,” he says. “I think we’ve created a lot of jobs in California. We have a few thousand people working for us and we have a profit sharing plan. And I have to leave the state.”
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ankey has always been one to keep close tabs on the numbers. The son of a Ford dealer, he studied finance at USC, bought out his father’s partners in the 1970s and turned around the struggling dealership, then expanded into auto lending. Today, his Westlake Financial is one of the nation’s largest subprime lenders, working with some 50,000 dealerships in all 50 states to offer high-interest car loans to buyers with poor or no credit. Hankey also owns auto insurance, rental car and dealer software companies, and has pushed into real estate, including helping develop the mixed-use Circa project across from Los Angeles’ Crypto.com Arena and supplying funding for “The One,” a 105,000-square-foot Bel Air megamansion purchased in 2022 by Fashion Nova billionaire Richard Saghian. His Knight Specialty Insurance Company made headlines in 2024 when it agreed to put up the $175 million bond Donald Trump had to pay after his (later overturned) New York civil fraud judgment.
Hankey says his $30 billion (assets) Hankey Group of companies will remain headquartered in Los Angeles for now, but he’s more inclined to invest in his new home state than his old one given the political climate. He still owns three homes in California, but plans to spend around two-thirds of his year outside the Golden State. “There’s no reason to be in California full-time,” he says.
Several other billionaires have echoed the sentiment since the tax proposal, from Rippling CEO Parker Conrad to Uber founder Travis Kalanick to venture capitalist Chamath Palihapitiya. Some have already left the state, including Google cofounder Larry Page, who spent $173.5 million on two Miami properties in December. (Page, who still has homes in California, is the billionaire who would owe the most as of now if California decides he didn’t get out in time.) Gavin Newsom, California’s Democratic governor, has publicly denounced the bill, which is sponsored by the Service Employees International Union–United Healthcare Workers West.
Its proponents, however, seem unconcerned. “When the dust clears, it’s consistently and robustly found in the academic literature that very few, if any, actually move,” David Gamage, one of the proposal’s authors and a professor at University of Missouri School of Law, recently told Forbes.
Longtime Florida resident Russell Savage—who was raised mainly in California and who founded Rockstar energy drinks using a $50,000 mortgage on his Sausalito, California, condo—is not buying it. “Larry Ellison left. I left. Elon Musk left. You go down the line. I mean, the proof is in the pudding,” Savage, formerly known as Russ Weiner, recently said. “They say no one’s leaving. It’s bullshit. It’s a complete lie. It’s going to destroy the state. The problem is it’s not just the super rich: When we’re all gone, then they go tax the next rung.”
Hankey says he partly based his decision to move to Nevada on a similar calculation. “I just don’t think it will be a one-shot deal,” he says of the proposed tax. “It’s going to come back again as soon as California needs money again.”
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