Tech billionaires are making plans to bail on California ahead a possible ballot measure that would tax their assets to help pay for healthcare.
Sources told the New York Times that venture capitalist Peter Thiel has explored spending more time outside California and opening an office for his Los Angeles-based personal investment firm, Thiel Capital, in another state.
I think it’s that a large pool of stocks going up for sale with no context seems suspicious. Stocks are inherently a gamble on the future price will be higher than current price, so by selling you’re withdrawing your bet which could be interpreted as you knowing that the bet won’t pay off and that other
gamblersowners paying attention might panic and try and sell too, which then could trigger a feedback loop. New buyers might see a bunch of people trying to sell and then think to themselves the bet isn’t a good one and won’t buy, making the current sellers reduce the price in the hopes of actually selling off and not left holding the bagA lot of “could” and "might* in that scenario, and it does play out from time to time (see NFTs, 2008 housing market). It also won’t play out if the reason for the sale is known and isn’t based on lost faith of the bet
Brilliant classic example of exception proving the rule. Both NFTs and the 2008 crash were caused by a massive lack of fundamentals, not irrational shareholder panic based on a few unknown selloffs, so the fact that those are the examples you came up with of big crashes just shows how weak the original claim was.
Apart from anything else, it doesn’t even stand on its own terms - if billionaires were required to pay wealth tax bills, then there wouldn’t be any mystery as to why they were selling their shares.