Silicon Valley’s congressman has become a lightning rod. He’s just fine with that
David Gamage was out to dinner with his wife and was already a few drinks deep late last year when his phone buzzed. According to the name on the screen, the call was coming from California congressman Ro Khanna.
Gamage, a tax law professor at The University of Missouri, was initially skeptical; he’d never spoken with Khanna before. But the outreach also made some sense. The Democratic lawmaker had recently voiced support for a California ballot initiative that Gamage and several other tax scholars coauthored—an initiative that would levy a one-time, 5% tax on California billionaires to help cover public education and cuts to federal healthcare funding in the state.
The proposal, which is sponsored by the California health workers union SEIU, had provoked furious backlash, prompting billionaires like Peter Thiel to begin cutting ties in California. Khanna, whose district is in Silicon Valley, had responded to their threats with a decidedly heavy dose of snark on X: “I echo what FDR said with sarcasm of economic royalists when they threatened to leave, ‘I will miss them very much.’”
Now, Khanna wanted to dig into the details with Gamage about how the proposal would work in practice.
“It was a somewhat surreal experience from my side,” says Gamage, who spent the evening attempting to elucidate the intricacies of complex tax policy over text. The two men followed up with a phone call where Khanna probed even further, expressing his concerns about how the proposal might impact “paper billionaires,” whose wealth is tied up in illiquid stock. The depth of the discussion surprised Gamage. “He has expressed real interest in understanding the mechanics and economics in a way that most politicians don’t,” Gamage says.
But that has hardly won Khanna any brownie points with California billionaires, many of whom were once some of his most devoted supporters. Former Google chair Eric Schmidt is among the billionaires backing a new super PAC to oppose the proposal, including by pushing a rival ballot measure to block the wealth tax. Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan and venture capitalist Ron Conway, both Khanna donors in the past, have thrown their weight behind Ethan Agarwal, a tech founder who recently abandoned his longshot race for governor to go after Khanna’s House seat in the California primary.
“Khanna has turned his back on the people of CA17,” Tan wrote on X, announcing his support for Agarwal, who previously founded the fitness app Aaptiv, and cofounded the Coterie, a software firm focused on tools for investors.
Conway, who once praised Khanna as an advocate “who will be really, really outspoken for tech,” echoed that sentiment in his own post, writing that it’s time for a Silicon Valley congressman “who prioritizes the advancement of technology.”
For Khanna, the uproar over the tax proposal is just the latest sign that tech billionaires have lost touch with the average worker in the industry they’ve come to represent. As evidence, he points to the $1.8 million that poured into his reelection campaign from some 30,000 donations last quarter, after he came out in favor of the wealth tax—a significant uptick from the last two quarters of 2025.
“The backlash is exaggerated by people who read X,” Khanna tells Fast Company, adding that the billionaires leading the charge against the proposal are “not the future.”
“I have the privilege of having support from more innovators, business and technology leaders than almost anyone,” he says. “There are very few billionaires. There are a lot more people in tech.”
But in poking some of Silicon Valley’s most powerful people in the eye, Khanna is taking a significant political risk. In some ways, the wealth tax debacle is the predictable outcome of the high-wire act that he has been attempting to pull off since he first came to Congress in 2017. Early on, he established himself as an emissary of the industry hoping to spread what was working in Silicon Valley to other parts of the country. But that message has grown messier as public opinion on Big Tech has soured, and tech billionaires have shifted sharply to the right.
Now, as Khanna’s national profile has grown and his name gets tossed around as a possible 2028 presidential contender, it’s become untenable for him to straddle the gap between progressives at the national level and the wealthiest constituents in his own backyard. As Democratic voters—and the politicians courting them—increasingly blame the ultrawealthy for making society less fair, the ultrawealthy are, in turn, testing old loyalties and searching for new champions. With his support for the billionaire tax—and subsequent introduction of a national billionaire tax proposal with Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders—Khanna appears to be planting both feet firmly on one side.
“My tagline is: If America has been good for you, you need to do good for America,” he says. “America has been good to a lot of these tech billionaires.”
The “tech groupie” on the Hill
Khanna grew up a long way from Silicon Valley, just outside of Philadelphia in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. At the University of Chicago, where he studied economics, Khanna had a chance encounter with a young Barack Obama, who was running for the Illinois Senate. “My recollection is that he was an exceedingly decent, gracious person, and that there was a lot of buzz around him as the future mayor,” he once told Businessweek, noting that meeting Obama was what got him interested in politics. Years later, after graduating from Yale Law School, Khanna would go on to work briefly for the Commerce Department under President Obama in 2009.
Khanna’s first congressional run came in 2014 during a simpler time for tech, when Silicon Valley startups were still broadly viewed as the darlings of the new economy and not the algorithmic engines of a wide range of societal ills. When his opponent’s supporters attempted to paint Khanna—by then a patent lawyer with backing from Peter Thiel and other tech leaders—as a corporate shill, Khanna told The New York Times that he wore the name “tech groupie” as “a badge of honor.”
Looking back, Khanna admits to looking at the industry through rose-colored classes. “During the Obama years, many of us had a hope that technology would be democratizing, that technology would help bring about democratic change around the world,” he says.
Losing that race, he’s since said, taught him an important lesson about aligning himself too closely with tech. “There are a lot more PTA leaders than tech leaders,” he recently told economist Paul Krugman, referring to advice he got from his then-opponent, former Congressman Mike Honda.
Still, when Khanna did take office in 2017—the same year Donald Trump took over the White House—it was with a decidedly optimistic message about the need to bring Silicon Valley-style prosperity to Trump country. He traveled to Kentucky to meet with displaced coal miners who were learning tech skills and joined JD Vance (then an author and investor) on a bus tour to promote tech investment throughout the Midwest. He later wrote in a Wall Street Journal op-ed that he and Vance “shared a deep concern that our country was being ripped apart,” in part due to rising wealth inequality between Silicon Valley and other parts of the U.S.
Even as the techlash got underway, Khanna’s positions remained relatively moderate toward tech. He opposed repealing Section 230, the liability shield that internet platforms rely on, and spoke out against “reflexive call[s] to break up companies.” His position on these hot-button issues—and continued financial ties to the industry—kept him one step removed from the anti-tech streak beginning to permeate Congress.
Today Khanna argues that he has always been supportive of a billionaire tax, pointing to his endorsement of Bernie Sanders’s 2016 campaign for president, which hinged on taxing “the 1%.” But he acknowledges that, to the extent he supported these ideas, it was often “theoretical and academic,” not tied to any specific bill or proposal. (Khanna’s spokesperson directed Fast Company to two social media posts to indicate his past support for wealth taxes.)
More often, he has advocated for policies that would put more money in low-income people’s pockets—but not explicitly by taking it out of the pockets of billionaires. His 2022 book, Progressive Capitalism, makes fleeting mention of increasing “taxes on corporations and the wealthy” to pay for things like Medicare for All. But the policies he proposes center on going after “tax cheaters” and closing corporate tax loopholes, rather than leveling a new tax on the fewer than 1,000 billionaires in the U.S.
At times he seemed to argue for just the opposite, writing in his book that the country shouldn’t “simply favor the redistribution of wealth,” but should focus on expanding opportunity. The key to more widespread prosperity, in other words, was to spur innovation beyond the coasts.
To that end, he was a champion of the bipartisan CHIPS and Science Act in 2022, which was based in part on a separate bill he cosponsored. The CHIPS Act promised to reinvigorate the U.S. semiconductor industry and received widespread support from the tech sector. (Recent research from the Brookings Institution suggests it has, indeed, begun to deliver on that promise, creating jobs and higher wages in areas with new semiconductor facilities.) “He’s always been focused on taking the strengths of Silicon Valley nationwide,” a Silicon Valley supporter of Khanna’s tells Fast Company.
“It caught all of us off guard”
None of this made Khanna the likeliest person to support a policy that would so thoroughly infuriate California billionaires, and according to Gamage, Khanna wasn’t involved in drafting the proposal.
Gamage and his colleagues initially drew up a version of the wealth tax years ago, but the hurdles of getting such a measure through in Sacramento proved too high. It wasn’t until last year that the SEIU, a prolific sponsor of California propositions, reached out about taking the proposal directly to voters as a ballot measure. Trump had already signed H.R. 1, better known as the One Big, Beautiful Bill, into law, which included $30 billion per year in cuts to California Medicaid funding. “We had to find revenue somewhere to deal with these looming cuts,” says SEIU’s chief of staff Suzanne Jimenez.
The final text of the proposal was already public when a Democratic member of California’s Assembly, Alex Lee, suggested that SEIU reach out to Khanna for his support, Jimenez says. From that first conversation, it was clear to her that Khanna would be backing the initiative. Still, even she wasn’t expecting him to come out in support quite the way he did.
While Jimenez says she was excited to read Khanna’s Christmastime clapback at billionaires threatening to leave the state, that feeling was hardly universal. Even some of those who remain in Khanna’s corner viewed his dismissive attitude as misguided. “It caught all of us off guard,” says the Silicon Valley supporter.
The rollout of Khanna’s positioning was “awkward” and “messy” the supporter says, noting his own concerns with the proposal. That includes the fact that the tax applies even to people—like many startup founders—whose net worth on paper may bear little resemblance to their actual wealth.
Tan and others, meanwhile, have argued that the proposal would cost people like Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin 50% of their shares in Alphabet because of a provision related to pricing the value of voting shares. Gamage and his colleagues have refuted those claims in detail and told Fast Company they amount to “misinformation.” Still, the looming tax bill has reportedly spooked Page and Brin enough that, in December, the two men collectively terminated or moved dozens of companies out of state.
Khanna has since acknowledged that perhaps mixing it up on X was a misstep. But he’s been unapologetic about supporting the proposal because, as he seemed to imply to The San Francisco Chronicle recently, it’s been politically fruitful—or at least, not damaging. “I’ve never been at a more popular place in the district,” he said.
Perhaps for that reason, Khanna appears unconcerned about the billionaire-backed primary challenge against him. In interviews, Agarwal has attempted to paint Khanna as a tech turncoat. “He put up this whole thing about being pro-tech and pro-business and pro-growth,” Agarwal told Fast Company. “I don’t know what happened to him.”
Sarah Drory, a Khanna spokesperson, has, in turn, charged Agarwal with having a “checkered financial and personal past.” Her comments come amid new reporting on past legal disputes involving Agarwal’s companies and one instance in which Agarwal, by his own admission, was accused of IP infringement after he “downloaded some porn” in a case that was later settled.
“I’ve often had a primary challenger,” Khanna says, adding jokingly, “it’s unclear to me who’s going to come in second or third.”
Taking on the “Epstein class”
The fact is, in 2025 67% of Americans viewed billionaires as making society less fair, an 8% uptick from 2024, according to the Harris poll. Among Democrats, that figure stands at 79%. It should come as no surprise that an ambitious politician with eyes on a 2028 White House run would lean into that messaging.
“The message that this is the guy who’s against the billionaires and wants to fund healthcare, I think that’s a good message,” says one California Democratic strategist who is not supportive of the proposal. “I think this is probably a good thing for him, even if it’s not good for the state.”
But Khanna has cited other reasons for his hardening stance on wealth, namely the who’s who of billionaires—many of them tech billionaires—whose (at best) chummy relationships with Jeffrey Epstein were documented in the Epstein files. Khanna, along with his Republican colleague Thomas Massie, coauthored the legislation that forced the release of the files, turning them into the faces of the fight. Khanna has since come to refer to the people named in the files as the “Epstein class” and spoken with optimism about carving out a new political lane focused on ending “elite impunity.”
Khanna attributes some of the growing animosity from billionaires to his outspokenness on this issue. At the same time, the revelations contained in the files have stirred up his own feelings of fury. “The experience of seeing how those elites operated gave me more of an emotional connection with the frustrations of Americans who felt dispensable as second-class citizens—as some of these women did,” he says. “I have an emotional capacity now to identify with that anger, as opposed to just a philosophical understanding.”
Yet Khanna has not turned his back on tech entirely. On April 9, in a well-timed flex of his continued status in certain Silicon Valley circles, he’s scheduled to appear onstage at Stanford University with Nvidia founder Jensen Huang. He has also been working behind the scenes to alleviate concerns about the tax proposal in the Valley. “He’s the only one talking to both the tech billionaires and to the labor leaders,” his Silicon Valley supporter says.
Gamage says he’s personally been looped in on a number of emails with California billionaires seeking answers, though he declined to name which ones. Khanna has previously said he would meet with Netflix chair Reed Hastings and LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman—both prominent Democratic donors.
According to a post Hoffman later shared on LinkedIn, the discussion didn’t change his mind about opposing the proposal, but his support for Khanna at least appeared on solid ground. “[H]e believes (1) that Silicon Valley is a massively important creation of the future, and (2) that he wants to preserve and evolve capitalism through creating a contribution loop from the massively wealthy to helping the rest of the people in the state,” Hoffman wrote of Khanna.
Khanna, meanwhile, takes credit for kick-starting a conversation about wealth inequality that has forced even opponents of the California wealth tax to step up with their own alternatives. Investor Vinod Khosla, who has criticized the proposal, recently suggested a federal doubling of capital gains taxes in an interview with Fortune. David Friedberg, an investor and cohost of the All-In podcast, similarly endorsed taxing loans that wealthy people take out against their assets.
“Where were these proposals before I spoke out?” Khanna says.
For now, Khanna is doubling down. The national bill he cosponsored with Sanders would go even further than California’s, instituting an annual tax on billionaires, rather than a one-time fee. And he’s begun to take a harsher stance on the tech industry writ large, recently endorsing the need “to repeal some of the section 230 immunity.”
These moves seem poised to burnish Khanna’s progressive bona fides at a national level. But in distancing himself from the Silicon Valley elite, Khanna finds himself in yet another balancing act—attempting to draw a firm distinction between the ultrawealthy few who have come to define his district and the average voter he hopes will deliver him another term in office come November.