Brin’s complaint also rests on a commonplace myth about Silicon Valley: great fortunes are the natural reward for individual brilliance. This is the self-congratulatory story told by many of the Valley’s loudest libertarians, such as Marc Andreessen, Elon Musk, and Peter Thiel.

Google’s own history tells the real story. The company did not emerge from Brin and cofounder Larry Page’s genius but from government funding. Its foundational search technology was developed at Stanford, inside a public research ecosystem built over decades by federal funding, elite universities, skills-based immigration, and the thick institutional ecology of Silicon Valley. Stanford’s account of the search engine giant notes that the development of Google’s algorithms ran on computers “mainly provided” by the National Science Foundation and other governmental funders. One of Brin’s own papers even acknowledges this support.

This is not simply hypocrisy. It is denying the economic history of Silicon Valley: public institutions absorb the risk, workers and researchers build the infrastructure, and then private owners capture the upside. Public investment helped create the foundations of the modern technology economy: the internet, GPS, touchscreens, voice recognition, semiconductors, artificial intelligence research, biomedical tools, and countless other commercial breakthroughs. But after those investments are converted into private fortunes, the wealthy beneficiaries ignore the source, denounce taxation as theft, and cast themselves as victims of “socialism.”

This arrogance would be irritating enough on its own. But in the current political moment, it’s outright dangerous.

At the same moment Brin and his fellow tech bros are raging against billionaire taxation, they are supporting an administration that is actively attacking the research system that made companies like Google possible. The Trump administration has sought deep cuts to science agencies, canceled or threatened grants that no longer align with its political priorities, and moved to impose political and ideological screening on research funding.

Its proposed 2027 budget included major reductions across the scientific state, including cuts to the National Science Foundation, NASA science programs, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, the Department of Energy’s Office of Science, and the National Institutes of Health. Most dramatically, it recently dismissed the entire National Science Board, the independent body that oversees the National Science Foundation. Subjecting science to ideological loyalty tests is not how free societies govern knowledge. It is a hallmark of authoritarian systems, from Russia to China.

That is why Brin’s “socialism” language is so tone-deaf and historically illiterate. It purposefully confuses democratic taxation that creates vast public benefit for tyranny — while also ignoring the authoritarian forces actively corroding the public foundations of American prosperity that Brin himself has benefited tremendously from. Taxes fund the institutions that make markets possible in the first place: not just America’s unparalleled universities and research system but also courts, schools, infrastructure, and social protections. It is the basic premise of a democratic political economy that Brin conveniently ignores.

A serious debate can be had about the design of a billionaire tax. There are legitimate questions over whether it should be administered by state or federal governments, how assets should be valued, and how revenue should be used. But calling it Soviet-style socialism is farcical. A billionaire tax does not abolish private property, nationalize Google, collectivize farms, seize factories, or place production under state planning.

Brin, of all people, should understand this. The lesson of the Soviet Union and Russia is not that billionaires should pay fewer taxes. It is that freedom depends on institutions strong enough to constrain concentrated power, whether that power sits in the state or in private fortunes large enough to bend democracy itself.

By attacking taxation as tyranny while aligning with forces that weaken universities, politicize science, and hollow out the public sphere, Brin is helping normalize the erosion of democratic life. His family fled one version of authoritarianism. He should not use that history to defend a politics in which the wealthy are trying to do the same through different means. If he really wants to honor the lesson of Russia, he should stop mistaking democracy for socialism — and stop helping turn America into an oligarchy.