Marvel star Mark Ruffalo tore into California Gov. Gavin Newsom over Prop 42, accusing the Democrat of selling out working people to shield billionaires from new wealth taxes.
The Avengers actor unloaded on X on Wednesday, framing Newsom’s support for the measure as another giveaway to the ultra-rich at the expense of ordinary Californians.
Ruffalo cast Prop 42 as a permanent shield for the wealthy and tied it to earlier fights with the governor over Hollywood’s corporate deals and artificial intelligence rules. Breitbart News reported the clash as the latest public break between a high-profile progressive celebrity and California’s Democratic governor.
Newsom has presented the same proposal in opposite terms: protection for retirement accounts and life savings, not a favor to billionaires.
In his post, Ruffalo did not say much about the governor’s record.
He wrote:
“Once again. Just like the Paramount Merger Gavin Newsom does what he always does. Sells out the working class people for the billionaires again and again. Not only that but endorses a bill that will make it impossible to tax the wealthy at all.”
That is the full charge. Newsom backs a ballot measure meant to block new state wealth taxes on California’s richest residents. Ruffalo calls that a betrayal of workers and a lockout on future taxes aimed at the top.
Prop 42 sits at the center of the fight. The seed coverage describes it as a plan to stop any new state wealth tax on the state’s billionaires. Ruffalo treats the endorsement as proof that Newsom will not touch the people who can most afford higher taxes.
Newsom’s own statement puts blue-collar groups and retirees in the frame, not tech founders or studio moguls.
The governor said:
“I am proud to stand with firefighters, blue-collar unions, veterans, seniors, and small businesses in support of Prop 42. We all agree that Californians deserve to have their retirement and life savings protected from new state taxes so those savings are there when they need them.”
That language is deliberate. Newsom ties the measure to pensions and nest eggs. He argues new state taxes would hit the savings ordinary people need later in life. Ruffalo hears a different story: a Democratic governor closing the door on taxing the rich.
Both men claim to speak for working Californians. Only one of them stars in billion-dollar Marvel films. The contrast notes itself.
Ruffalo’s “once again” line points straight back to the Paramount and Warner Brothers Discovery merger fight in September.
He accused Newsom of helping Donald Trump through that deal and branded the settlement a betrayal. Coverage of his remarks summarized the settlement as a “huge win to Trump” in Ruffalo’s telling. Exact extended quotes from that earlier blast were not fully reproduced beyond that fragment, but the actor’s position was plain: Newsom had sided with corporate power and against the progressive line.
Now the same actor is recycling the charge on wealth taxes. The pattern is the point. When Newsom declines the hardest-left option, Ruffalo reaches for the sellout label.
Early this month Ruffalo hit Newsom again, this time over a state AI bill the governor vetoed.
In a TIME piece headlined as calling the veto “a mistake,” Ruffalo and co-author Joseph Gordon-Levitt urged the public to “follow the money.” One passage from that commentary read:
“AI is now a real-life technology, and love it or hate it, most everyone agrees it will make a massive impact on all of our real lives.”
Ruffalo wanted sharper state controls. Newsom used the veto. The actor answered with a money trail narrative and a public rebuke. Prop 42 is the third turn of the same screw: merger, AI rules, wealth taxes.
California already runs on high taxes, heavy regulation, and progressive branding. That has not satisfied the activist tier of the entertainment left. Ruffalo’s standard is simple. If a policy leaves room for billionaires to keep more of what they earn, the governor has sold out.
Newsom’s standard, at least on Prop 42, is different. He lists firefighters, union members, veterans, seniors, and small businesses and says their savings deserve protection from new state taxes. Voters will decide which story they believe. The celebrity pressure campaign is already underway on X.
Wealthy actors enjoy every legal right to demand higher taxes on other people’s capital. They do not get to erase the governor’s stated reason for the endorsement, or the coalitions he claims. Ruffalo’s post skips the retirement-savings argument entirely and jumps to class betrayal. That is messaging, not a ledger.
Progressive politics in California keeps eating its own when the results fail the purity test. A Democratic governor who declines a new wealth tax becomes, in this telling, a servant of billionaires. The working-class groups named in Newsom’s statement disappear from the actor’s frame. So does any serious talk of what repeated tax hikes do to investment, jobs, and the retirees who already live under California’s cost structure.
Ruffalo wants the rich squeezed harder. Newsom says he is guarding the savings of people who fought fires, served in uniform, and built small firms. One of those arguments will have to survive contact with actual voters.
Hollywood can lecture Sacramento about solidarity all day. Taxpayers still have to live with the bill when the lecture becomes law.
