Have billionaires become more tax-friendly since the financial crisis?

This article introduces the billionaire tax speech dataset, which provides comprehensive data on the tax speech acts of the hundred richest billionaires living in democracies over the past three decades. It has four major findings. First, the majority of these billionaires did speak publicly about wealth-based taxation, and the extent to which they did so rose explosively after the 2008 financial crisis. Second, while the billionaires became much more likely to weigh in, they have not become more tax-friendly in their public statements. In the first years after the financial crisis pro-tax speech outweighed anti-tax speech, but the trend has since been in the opposite direction. Third, there has, however, been a continuous rise in self-justifying speech: statements that sought to justify a billionaire's own tax record against concrete or diffuse allegations, since the publication of the Panama Papers in 2016. Finally, the terms of debate have shifted. Before the crisis, anti-tax billionaires were still seeking to slash wealth-based taxes further, while pro-tax billionaires sought to retain them. Afterwards, pro-tax billionaires pushed for new or higher wealth-based taxes, and anti-tax billionaires were more often on the defensive, opposing new or more taxation.