Do you know what should be illegal? The way facebook does account deletion.
When you 'delete' your account, you actually put it into a special state for 30 days. If you log in, even accidentally, during those 30 days, the cancellation is canceled. So, if like most Facebook addicts (as I was), you had the habit of typing 'facebook.com' every 30 minutes or so, it would undo your facebook deletion request.
The proper thing to do is to either delete the account immediately (although I understand why maybe losing all your data is a bad idea), or, get rid of the automatic reinstatement and require users to go through a separate process to reclaim their accounts before data purging.
Facebook knows that by operating with this cancellation scheme, they can basically prevent cancellations of the addicted, since moments of clarity when someone requests deletion are soon clouded by moments of habit when someone types in 'facebook.com' to satisfy the itch.
> To close the loophole, putting private shares into a Roth IRA should be banned because they have no true market price that indicates their worth.
Why should they be banned? Everything has a price. IIRC, in a self-directed IRA you can put anything... paintings, gold, collectibles, houses. Why not random shares?
I see a huge problem here. Roth IRAs were made with certain guarantees. That some people would make outsized returns in a country of almost 400 million should be expected. Why do we find it necessary to then go and 'get our fair share'? Didn't we already set the rules? Why must we now change them since some guy got lucky?
Ideally, we should just say 'good job Mr Thiel', you held up your end of the bargain and we'll hold up ours. The deal was already struck. This is why no one trusts the American government.
Also, I'd point out that the roth IRA mentioned here is only nominally worth $5b. If he were to sell all the shares there would likely be a huge drop in price. Either way, what goes unmentioned is that the $5b wouldn't be taxed anyway if it was all in unrealized capital gains.