Larry Page closed on a Coconut Grove estate in December for $101.5 million. Less than a month later, records show he paid $71.9 million for a second waterfront property a short walk away. By March, his Google co-founder Sergey Brin had added a $51 million home on the gated Allison Island to his own Miami holdings. Together, the two men have put more than $225 million into South Florida real estate over roughly the past year, according to a Fortune report citing Bloomberg reporting and Miami-Dade property records.
The purchases aren’t happening in isolation. Alphabet, the pair’s former company, has quadrupled its Miami office footprint this year, expanding from about 10,000 square feet to roughly 45,000 square feet at 1450 Brickell Avenue in the city’s financial district, Bloomberg reported. Google declined to comment on the expansion when Fortune asked.
The backdrop is a ballot measure Californians will decide on November 3: the 2026 Billionaire Tax Act, which would impose a one-time 5% tax on the net worth of the state’s roughly 200 billionaires, according to Ballotpedia’s summary of the initiative. It’s the kind of concrete, dollar-and-date story that shows how a still-unresolved tax proposal can already be moving real capital, months before a single vote is cast…