Because the wealth of Jeff Bezos according to Forbes is just the amount of Amazon shares he owns, multiplied by the price of the stock on whatever day it was that somebody at Forbes decided to work out how much he was worth. Bezos, just like you and I, pays tax on his income. He only gets taxable income from the value of his Amazon shares when he sells them, which like most founders, he doesn’t do very frequently.
You’re literally just getting upset at him for not liquidating his entire position of Amazon shares (or options) every year. If he ever wants to turn the theoretical number some Forbes intern came up with for his net worth into income, then he’ll have to pay tax on it. He could theoretically live the rest of his life without selling his shares if he wanted to, just like you or I never have to sell any shares, or property, or any other type of asset we own. However if he did that, the IRS is going to come and take the tax he owes from his estate.
There is no tax evasion taking place here, this isn’t even a loophole. It’s the same treatment everybody gets.
You don’t have to sell your assets if you don’t want to, and you don’t make a taxable profit from selling your assets… unless you sell them. The propublica article you’re quoting is designed entirely to rage-bait people who don’t want to think about the topic long enough to figure that very basic fact out.
I’ve worked with organisations that trade SLOCs other types of instruments that are typically used for these types of transactions. They can be used to defer taxable events in some cases (by taking a loan today instead of selling your shares/options), but there’s no way to use them to avoid paying taxes on local assets. This is especially true with Musk, because he’ll have to sell expiring options soon, which will be a taxable event no matter what.
The only way they can be used to avoid paying taxes all together is if you’re trying to derive income from assets held (usually secretly) offshore, and this is almost always criminal tax evasion. The only thing they’re achieving in this circumstance is basically an international fund transfer without creating any taxable income. There are no secret tricks you can do to transfer your assets beyond the control of the IRS, you can’t “give” them to a bank, and if they’re collected as collateral on a defaulted loan, that’s a taxable event too.
Companies can get away with moving their profits to other jurisdictions, because a collection of subsidiary companies can exist in as many different tax jurisdictions as you want. Individuals can’t (legally) do this, especially not US citizens, because they remain US tax residents for their entire lives, regardless of where they live or work.
A lot of billionaires don’t pay a lot of taxes every year, because they don’t have a lot of income every year. The only way to turn it into a scandal is if you ignore all the years in which they do pay a lot of taxes. Which is, of course, fundamentally stupid.
I really don’t think this is true. Being granted the stock is a taxable event, even if you don’t liquidate any of it, and even if that means you have to sell some to pay the taxes.
Also, the methodology you’ve described for avoiding taxes is used to benefit from offshore holdings, not avoid paying taxes on locally held assets.
Isn’t any equity he is awarded for the period of work he did as a tax resident of California, taxable in California, regardless of whether those gains are realized today or in 20 years?
This is simply a convoluted fantasy. Marx’ own words prove you wrong.
> The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degree, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralise all instruments of production in the hands of the State
> We by no means intend to abolish this personal appropriation of the products of labour, an appropriation that is made for the maintenance and reproduction of human life, and that leaves no surplus wherewith to command the labour of others
The state will control all property, any property an individual possesses will be exclusively granted by the state, and no person will possess any property in excess of their basic needs.
This is the philosophy of Marx. He wrote it down for all of us to read. You can clearly come up with contrived arguments for why this doesn’t represent a perfect equality of outcomes, but Marx’ visions would be clearly considered an enforced equality of outcomes by any reasonable person.
I cited several quotes from Marx claiming he planned to abolish private property. Did you not see that? It doesn’t matter what he called it, if you’re promoting one outcome for everybody, you’re promoting equality of outcome.
This is an absurdly revisionist view, that can be falsified simply by reading his work. The only way to dismantle class structure is to institute equality of outcomes.
His view of equality of outcomes is perhaps the most extreme view of equality possible. His view was to abolish private property all together. Something he passionately and repeatedly promoted.
> In this sense, the theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property.
> But if selling and buying disappears, free selling and buying disappears also. This talk about free selling and buying, and all the other “brave words” of our bourgeois about freedom in general, have a meaning, if any, only in contrast with restricted selling and buying, with the fettered traders of the Middle Ages, but have no meaning when opposed to the Communistic abolition of buying and selling, of the bourgeois conditions of production, and of the bourgeoisie itself.
> You are horrified at our intending to do away with private property. But in your existing society, private property is already done away with for nine-tenths of the population
> In one word, you reproach us with intending to do away with your property. Precisely so; that is just what we intend.
The nice sounding quotes about dismantling class structure don’t stand up to even passing scrutiny. These ideas are not compatible with a free society, and by presenting them in that way, you are concealing the oppressive nature of the system they are promoting.
Even within the Marxist two-class world view, it is still contradictory. “We recognise people are unequal, but we will ensure that their economic outcomes are”. If the first part doesn’t contradict the second, then it certainly isn’t a relevant part of the message.
But even then, the strict two class world view doesn’t describe Marx’ entire philosophy regarding class, which was founded on ideas of social isolation. Something any level of class inequality will create.
Though in any case, the two class world view doesn’t fit into reality at all. According to that theory, anybody with capital is in the upper class. That’s a huge majority of people today. The moment you let people use capital, you have a Marxist theory class system. How could you possibly eliminate that? There’s no way? Well this was actually a problem Marx solved, and the quote makes much more sense when you account for that:
> The theory of Communism may be summed up in one sentence: Abolish all private property.
As we can agree that inequality is natural, the burden of proof is on you to prove that any particular inequality is unjustifiable.
You have fallen back on the same lazy trope that for inequality to exist, that it simply must be due to injustice.
Aside from your illogical assertion that inheritance some how constitutes an unjustified inequality. A person can give their property to anybody they please, we can and we do tax such transactions, but it perpetuates wealth across generations, it does not constitute an unnatural or unjust inequality.
> Human beings are vastly more similar than usually believed, after deliberately taking some moderate amount of training in something.
The differences from one person to another simply cannot be dismissed. If you seperate people into large enough group, the average differences become much smaller. But from one person to the next, differences are often very extreme. If you took two random people from the worlds population, you have no reason at all to believe their motivations, or the choices they made in life would have much in common at all.
That quote doesn’t stand up to basic scrutiny. Perfectly normal differences from one person to another will result in perfectly normal differences in economic outcomes from one person to another. To eradicate classes, you must eradicate differences in economic outcomes, or at least make the differences so small that they cannot possibly be classifiable. The first half of the quote contradicts the second half.
All differences result in inequalities, and diversity is a measure of differences. If you had a diverse group, and you were measuring the diversity by skills, then you would have a group with unequal skills.
If you measure equality by outcomes, regardless of the type of outcome you’re measuring, then you’re measuring people’s differences as much as you’re measuring anything else. Unequal outcomes are not something that can be remedied, nor something that we should attempt to remedy.
> The easiest way to identify a monopoly is to look at how badly a company can treat its customers and still get away with it.
I’m not saying your wrong in this case, but that’s not a very reliable measure. Companies that have the best product can treat their customers like shit. Companies that have the lowest prices can treat their customers like shit. Any company that has a strong competitive offering that’s not based on service can treat their customers like shit.
But even if the app crashes every time it loads, that would meet your definition of a bug. I’ve never personally seen a single bug so bad that it killed a company, but I’ve seen products so riddled with bugs that they killed companies. An app with chronic stability issues? Those are bugs. Automated processes silently fail some times? Bugs. Interactive processes randomly fail sometimes? Bugs.
I’ve seen plenty of companies with ideas that seemed decent fail because they were unable to deliver an adequately functional product, for the sort of reasons I mentioned above. All of which I’d consider bugs.
Depends on how you classify bugs. If a bug is anytime your product doesn’t work the way it’s supposed to, then yeah, I’ve seen startups suffer massively from that. I worked with one that had 90% of new customers churn out in their first month (you might be able to guess, that company doesn’t exist any more). If you broaden your definition to include ‘problems with the code base that significantly slow down new features’, then I’ve seen even more startups die trying to release their ‘v2.0’.
The thing about the ‘we’ll iterate on it later’ mentality is that your product has to be in pretty good shape to be able to benefit from small incremental improvements. If it’s a garbage fire then making the smallest changes turns into an arduous nightmare, that inevitably just ends up introducing even more bugs to your product.
But to be fair, for as many startups as I’ve seen go out of business due to these problems, I’ve seen just as many stagnate into a state where they have just enough revenue to cover their small payroll, and remain in that state for a very long time.
You’re literally just getting upset at him for not liquidating his entire position of Amazon shares (or options) every year. If he ever wants to turn the theoretical number some Forbes intern came up with for his net worth into income, then he’ll have to pay tax on it. He could theoretically live the rest of his life without selling his shares if he wanted to, just like you or I never have to sell any shares, or property, or any other type of asset we own. However if he did that, the IRS is going to come and take the tax he owes from his estate.
There is no tax evasion taking place here, this isn’t even a loophole. It’s the same treatment everybody gets.
You don’t have to sell your assets if you don’t want to, and you don’t make a taxable profit from selling your assets… unless you sell them. The propublica article you’re quoting is designed entirely to rage-bait people who don’t want to think about the topic long enough to figure that very basic fact out.