> How am I responsible? Should I buy a tank of gazoline and go burn Kremlin?
Honestly, yes. If that's what it takes. You're responsible not because it's your fault, but because you (collectively) are the ones in a position to do something about it.
I don't entirely disagree but I think a slightly better framing is: It's not their fault, but it is their responsibility. Putin is a problem for the world, and it's a problem that can only be properly solved by the Russian people. Unfortunately, that means whether they deserve it or not, they are the group to whom pressure needs to be applied.
My point is just that moving because of high taxes doesn't make sense for him, even if you think he cares about the money. He doesn't have to pay it unless he wants to.
I'm not sure I understand the question. The assets in your estate get their cost basis reset to the current market value when your estate is passed on. That means the capital gains in his shares disappear.
That being said, the estate tax would kick in for everything over 11m, so he'd have to use other tricks to work around that limitation.
Yep, you've got it. The most beautiful part of the whole thing is the step up in basis for the estate. When you pass on your estate, the cost basis of all your assets get "stepped up" to the current market value. This means that if he passes on his estate to his children, they can then sell the shares to repay the loan with zero tax.
All this adds up to zero capital gains taxes being paid ever on the entire amount.
Not really. His loan will be way way way way over-collateralized, and like I said, he can even hedge it perfectly. His cost will likely be about the RFR.
No it isn't. CA will still try to tax those shares if and when he decides to liquidate them. However, Musk does not ever need to liquidate any shares. If he never wants to pay any tax, all he has to do is buy a hedge against the shares (thereby locking in a particular price) and take out loans against the now hedged asset. And like magic, he's got all the cash he could ever need and zero capital gains.
His tax situation really has nothing to do with it. If he sells his Tesla shares, he's still going to owe CA tax. But he never has to sell any Tesla shares, he can just buy hedges against them and take out loans. If you have sufficient capital assets, you never have to actual earn any "income" or generate any "capital gains" if you don't want to.
I mean, you could just as easily argue that the problems of California are what caused his move to Texas, as simply testing the waters for the move of the HQ.
> -The idea that both sides have a point and trying to rule out one side is anathema to a well-functioning society. In other words, why can't everyone just get along? Well guess what, sometimes one side is unambigiously right and the other unambiguously wrong. Some disagreements can't be resolved other than through power struggles, such as e.g. when one side's position implies the negation of the other side's rights, identity or existence. We can't have a rational, dispassionate debate about whether I should have rights. I can't argue for my existence, I want it.
If that's the framing you want to choose, then you have to accept the possibility that its a power struggle you may lose. The point of debating things is that the most justifiable side should win. In a power struggle, the side that wins may or may not be the correct one. If you think your position is correct, you should prefer the debate to the power struggle.
It's only people that fear they may not be able to justify their view that prefer to struggle for power.
> -Equivocating all controversial statements as equally controversial. For instance, design decisions about a codebase vs. religion issues vs. presumably something even deeper ('so hateful and disgusting'). Some fights are worth having, some are not.
That's all context-dependent, though. Design decisions about a codebase are a fight absolutely worth having in the context of a startup, as in the story.
That's really not true. Everyone knows what they're doing. They're doing statistical arbitrage. There's many firms that do it, Two Sigma, Citadel, etc.. The only thing secretive about it is the exact details of each strategy. Renaissance, for instance, pioneered techniques like using satellite imagery to track sales. One of their early strategies noticed that the market tended to go up on days when the weather was nice in NYC. Things like this are what they're doing, but on a grand scale and with a lot of very very smart people working on them.
While it is possible that they're making their profits by shifting risk onto unsophisticated players, it's certainly not necessary for them to do that to make money. They have the smartest people in the world working for them.
You're right. But there's very good reasons to think that they won't come from levered quant strategies like Renaissance's. They're extremely diversified and tend to be market neutral.
Yes, you can name one time that that happened. But do you understand the types of strategies RenTech is using? They're diversified across thousands of equities on the long and short side. They're market neutral. Taking on amounts of leverage that seem crazy to you is actually very reasonable in this setting, and it's very easy to show that this is reasonably safe.
Their lenders likely understand the risks pretty well. Their lenders are going to be large banks that have entire departments dedicated to modeling risks like these, and making sure that the risks don't exceed certain limits on these accounts. Nobody's getting screwed, except arguably the government out of some taxes here.
Honestly, yes. If that's what it takes. You're responsible not because it's your fault, but because you (collectively) are the ones in a position to do something about it.