The Great Billionaire Migration

**Ed Elson** (0:00)
Support for the show comes from Odoo.
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**SPEAKER_2** (0:39)
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**SPEAKER_3** (1:15)
Support for this show comes from Odoo.
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**Scott Galloway** (1:55)
Today's number, three and a half billion dollars. That's the cost of the Blue Origin New Glenn rocket that blew up on the launch pad two days ago.

**Ed Elson** (2:06)
Ed.

**Scott Galloway** (2:11)
Ed, what do you call a gay man on the moon?

**Ed Elson** (2:14)
What do I call a gay man on the moon? I'm not sure.

**Scott Galloway** (2:17)
I'm an astronaut, you fucking homophobe.

**Ed Elson** (2:25)
That's actually pretty good. Usually it's shocking and terrible, and that one is, yeah, it's good.

**Scott Galloway** (2:31)
Who wants a dirty joke?
That's why we're here. So, you know, I'm in Miami, a little stressed, so I decided to bring my boyfriend with me. And he's super into choking and asked me to choke him. So I reluctantly agreed, but I don't think he's into it. The last seven hours, he's been still in giving me the silence treatment.

**Ed Elson** (3:08)
So, Scott, Florida has long lured people in with its beaches, its sunshine, its nightclubs, and also its extremely low taxes.
The state has no income tax, no estate tax, no capital gains tax, and as a result, it has increasingly become the new home for America's wealthiest. In the past two decades, the number of billionaires living in the sunshine state has grown twentyfold. And with the California wealth tax proposal looming over Silicon Valley, many more tech magnates are moving in, from Sergey Brin to Larry Page to Mark Zuckerberg, who just bought a house nearby. So with Florida's newfound reputation as the billionaire bunker, that's what some people are calling it, the question for Floridians is, is this a good thing for the economy? Is it a good thing for the state? Or is it a bad thing? What do you think, Scott?

**Scott Galloway** (4:12)
So I think a lot about brand. I teach a brand strategy course for the last 25 years, and I think about what are some of the best brand moves, some of the worst brand moves. By the way, the worst brand move of the last 72 hours is having tech literally fuck up one of the best brands in the world, Ferrari. That is just the stupidest tech product since the Cybertruck.
But some other great, some an amazing brand move the last year. I think the American Pope is going to be great for the American brand.
I think cutting US aid is probably the worst brand move for the United States in a long time.
Believing that this state is low tax is one of the most elegant brand moves. And there was a lot of applause. But let me let me just be clear. It's total fucking bullshit that you're a low tax state. What you are is you have figured out a way to elegantly brand a transfer of wealth from young people who earn their money through work to old people like me who make money through selling and buying stocks. So you may think this is a low tax state. It's not. It's a transfer of wealth from earners and lower and middle income households to wealthy owners. For example, you have a fairly healthy state sales tax, which taxes consumption at 6 percent. Someone making $10 million a year and maybe consumes one-tenth of their income. So they're effectively paying a 0.6 percent sales tax. Someone who makes $50,000 a year uses all of their money on consumption. They're paying the full 6 percent. You have some of the highest property taxes in the nation. If you're very wealthy, yeah, maybe you have a house, you pay a lot of tax. But as a proportion of your income, you're probably paying 10 percent of your income on housing. Or someone who makes $50,000 a year is probably paying 30 percent of their income on housing and paying a higher tax rate. You think, well, they're probably renting. Be clear, high real estate taxes affect renters just as much as owners. So in some, state sales tax for people like me is 1 to 2 percent. State sales taxes and consumption taxes are between 10 and 13 percent for lower and middle income households in Florida. Or put another way, the D in democracy in Florida is working really well. Because old people vote and there's a lot of old people down here, and effectively what has happened is they have figured out a tax code to transfer wealth from low and middle income earners, which is most people you meet in Miami, to high-income old people who own a lot of shit. So be clear, Florida is a proxy for what has happened in America in the last 30 or 40 years. And that is nothing but an elegant transfer of wealth from lower and middle income households to the wealthy. This is not a low-tax state. This is America transferring money from lower and middle income young people to old rich people.