LA unions plot yet another wealth attack with ‘Overpaid CEO Tax’

LA socialists are plotting yet another wealth tax, aiming this time at “overpaid CEOs” — and needling favorite target Elon Musk by holding their launch party outside his Tesla Diner.

Members of the hotel unions that helped muscle through Los Angeles’ controversial $30-an-hour wage stood outside Musk’s eatery in Hollywood on Wednesday and began collecting signatures for a new ballot measure they’re calling the “Overpaid CEO Tax.”

The initiative — backed by the Democratic Socialists-tied Unite Here Local 11 and a slate of allied unions — targets companies with at least 1,000 employees if their top executive earns more than 50 times the median worker’s pay in Los Angeles.

The penalty for the targeted CEOs is an added city business tax worth one to 10 times the current rate, which now runs between roughly 0.1% and 0.425% of gross receipts.

“A growing and dangerous divide is tearing Los Angeles apart,” Unite Here Local 11 co-President Kurt Petersen said in a statement — blasting CEOs for raking in big bucks while their workers “juggle two and three jobs” and struggle to afford rent and health care.

The proposal, if approved by voters, would generate about $500 million a year, with the dough directed toward providing more low-income housing, sidewalk repairs and other city projects, backers said.

But local business leaders told The Post that the proposal is another step down a familiar — and risky — fiscal path for the city.

“When that revenue stream falters, the reflexive response is always the same: tax businesses again,” said George Francisco, co-chair of the LA BizFed Responsible Governance Committee and board chair of the Westside Council of Chambers of Commerce.

“That approach hasn’t fixed fiscal mismanagement or corruption, and it hasn’t delivered the services residents are paying for.”

He said Los Angeles specifically and California in general already rely on what he called an “inverted pyramid” tax system — where a small number of high earners and large employers bankroll the bulk of public services.

He likened the proposed CEO tax to efforts aimed at billionaires in the state, arguing such tactics have failed to stabilize California’s finances in the past, since they have led to investment and jobs moving to financially friendlier states.

Musk himself pulled Tesla and SpaceX out of California and moved them to Texas in 2024.

“To anyone who’s been watching long enough, this is how a billionaire tax becomes a millionaire tax … then a tax on everyone else,” Francisco said of the left’s latest proposed wealth attack. “The hits just keep coming.”

Unite Here Local 11 has been a key backer of Democratic Socialists of America–aligned city council members, including Eunisses Hernandez (CD1) and Hugo Soto-Martínez (CD13), both elected on aggressive labor platforms with heavy union support.

Those same forces helped drive the City Council’s 2023 vote to raise the minimum wage for hotel and airport workers to $30 an hour by 2028 — a move unions branded an “Olympic wage” ahead of the 2028 Games.

To the north, San Francisco voters approved a similar CEO tax last year, imposing a surcharge on companies whose top executives earn vastly more than their workers — a move that has also sparked warnings from business leaders there about reduced hiring and investment.

To qualify for the November ballot, backers in Los Angeles have 120 days to collect roughly 140,000 valid signatures from registered city voters.