Meta tax deal sentences Zuckerberg to eight years in California

Meta has agreed to pay California a ransom for its own chief executive and leave him in the state as surety. The company disclosed the arrangement on Wednesday night, in the tone of a power that has lost a war it never quite fought.

The real terms are simple enough. If California brings in a one-off 5% tax on billionaires, Meta will help Mark Zuckerberg pay it. In return, he stays in California for eight years.

What followed is less simple. Meta's lawyers have written the deal as a hostage treaty, the kind European crowns once used to swap princes. It exists in three copies. One sits in Menlo Park, one in Sacramento, and one, for reasons nobody will explain, in the Vatican.

I have seen this film before. In 1526 Francis I of France handed his two young sons to Spain to win his own release. The boys spent years in Spanish custody. The treaty collapsed anyway.

Meta's version is gentler. Its chief executive will be held at his own homes, guarded by his own security and fed by his own chefs. The company calls this "residence-based assurance." Historians would call it the old arrangement with better catering.

"We are not paying a ransom. We are paying a tax for someone so that he does not leave. That is a completely different sentence."

That was Ottoline Brack, Meta's newly created Head of Sovereign Relations. Under the treaty, she said, Sacramento may send three observers each year to confirm the hostage is still in California. "They can check from the road," she added. "There are a lot of fences."

The English paid the Danes to go away for much of the 990s. They called it Danegeld, and the Danes kept coming back for more. Meta is attempting the reverse: paying the state so that its man may stay. Nobody has yet worked out who the Vikings are.

Not everyone is grateful. Priya Hallworth, of the campaign group Californians for Taxing Whoever Is Left, said the plan had misfired. "We set out to tax billionaires," she said. "Instead a company has bought one a residence permit for the state he already lives in."

Shareholders, who will fund the tribute, have been reassured. They were reminded that they always wanted long-term commitment from leadership. They had simply never specified a castle.

The treaty does contain one escape clause. If the chief executive leaves early, Meta keeps the money and California keeps the metaverse. Sacramento's lawyers are said to be reading that clause very slowly.