toodleyloo

Kalshi raised $1B at a $22B valuation led by Coatue, with participation from Morgan Stanley, Sequoia, a16z, and others. In 2018, we were two kids who loved math, markets, and debate. And we had a dream: build the next generation financial market, where we capture a broader set of questions and harness the power of the masses to price them better than Wall Street. Kalshi was born to fulfill that dream. Today, most of these questions are traded indirectly, priced through imprecise proxies or negotiated bilaterally in opaque, restricted, relationship-driven markets. But thanks to our incredible community of users who make our markets work, Kalshi has the opportunity to change that by turning historically fragmented and untradeable risk into open, liquid, and standardized markets. We’ve seen this movie before. When interest rates, currencies, commodities, and crypto moved from dark to lit markets, volume did not just migrate: access expanded, new use cases emerged, and the opportunity grew by orders of magnitude. Today, Kalshi represents over 90% of US prediction market volume and the majority of activity globally, with annualized volume growing to $178B over the past 6 months. What started as retail is quickly becoming institutional — hedge funds, asset managers, prop firms, and insurers are beginning to trade, provide liquidity, and hedge real-world risk directly. The scope and scale of prediction markets are just beginning to take shape. We’re using this new capital to accelerate the institutional adoption underway — unlocking trillions in capital to facilitate active trading and risk management. Prediction markets are moving from early adoption to core financial infrastructure. This is just the beginning.

This is one of the dumbest tax proposals in California's history, and the math is so bad it embarrasses the people who wrote it. Start with the headline. SEIU promises $100B in revenue. California spends $161B a year on Medi-Cal alone. The entire windfall, if collected at face value, funds 7 months of one program. Then it's gone forever, and the structural deficit they claim to fix returns the day the check clears. Now the math gets uglier. The Hoover Institution estimates the permanent income tax loss from departing residents makes the net fiscal impact NEGATIVE by $25 billion. Read that twice. California sets fire to political capital, court costs, and capital flight to NET LOSE $25B. They're proposing to torch recurring revenue to fund 7 months of a program they've already underfunded for a decade. The exodus already happened. $700B in net worth wired out of California before January 1, 2026. Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Travis Kalanick gone. The remaining 208 billionaires aren't tech founders sitting on liquid stock. They're real estate, agriculture, entertainment, the people whose wealth is physically bolted to California. Mobile capital fled. Trapped capital pays. Read what San José mayor Matt Mahan, a Democrat running for governor, said about this on KQED: "It will lead to middle-class people having to pay higher taxes in the long run." A Democratic gubernatorial candidate openly admitting the wealth tax is a regressive transfer to the middle class. That's the part proponents won't put on the signs. The legal exposure is worse. The proposal taxes wealth held as of January 1, 2026, retroactively, after voter approval in November 2026. Retroactive wealth taxation has never survived constitutional challenge in any US state. Washington's capital gains tax survived only because the state Supreme Court reclassified it as an excise tax. The poison-pill measure on the same November ballot bans retroactive taxation by constitutional amendment, funded by $80M from people who can afford the lawyers. Every wealthy democracy that tried this killed it. France's wealth tax drove out an estimated 42,000 millionaires and €100B in capital before they repealed it in 2017. Italy, Sweden, Germany, Denmark, Austria, Finland, Iceland all tried wealth taxes. All repealed. California is about to vote on the experiment every comparable economy already ran and lost. The signatures are real. The math is fake. The capital is already gone.

Google co-founder Sergey Brin is coming out as Republican, per NYT The reporting follows Brin's ambitious efforts to kill the California wealth tax, elect a Republican to California governor, and move his residency out of California. He finally expressed his sentiment in a comment to NYT: "I fled socialism with my family in 1979 and know the devastating, oppressive society it created in the Soviet Union. I don't want California to end up in the same place."

Sergey Brin, founder of Google, on the California wealth tax making the ballot: "I fled socialism with my family in 1979 and know the devastating, oppressive society it created in the Soviet Union. I don’t want California to end up in the same place." He has now fled California

This is significant I get it — taxing Billionaires is popular But the proposed tax in CA is something vastly more expansive It would give the CA legislature a new power: The ability to lower the threshold or repeatedly pass the tax Simply with votes from the CA legislature