Mason  🏃‍♂️ ✂️

Under a 3% wealth tax, Bezos’ first-year “fair share” exceeds *all* his liquid assets. Founders’ wealth is in their companies, not yachts. There’s nothing worth enough to sell but ownership stake. A cartoon vision of wealth is going to dismantle the strongest economy in the world

3% sounds high but I don't get the objection - is the idea that he would cease to be CEO because he loses his shares? If Bezos is the best CEO can't he stay on because others shareholders will vote him in? As for liquidity he can hand over 3% of his equity to the IRS directly?

Liquidity may be a bigger problem for other assets, but can't the IRS just take 3% of the the thing on paper, and collect the $ whenever it's sold? I feel like some creativity to accommodate this new kind of tax should be able to make it practical in most cases.

I can well believe that wealth taxes have bad incentive effects, as do other taxes on capital and labour income, but haven't heard a clear argument that they're worse than the alternatives, at appropriately low rates.

Bezos can keep his job & still find himself newly beholden to more conservative interests with less personal skin in the game. I think this matters — where would SpaceX be? If you're not taking the tax until a sale, it's just a worse capital gains tax that disincentivizes risk.

Usually I also like concentrated ownership of companies, as groups who have a lot of their $ in a company have the greatest incentive to pay attention and manage it well. That said,

i) Do we have any evidence on whether companies actually do much better when founder/CEOs retain control for many years? I could also see them being worse in various ways and boards being right when they remove them (e.g. skills to run big corp are different than to start one).

ii) I can think of lots of founders who are still running the show while owning well under 50% of the company - Bezos, the google guys, Zuckerberg, Tesla/SpaceX, Dell (at least he took it back). How strong is the evidence other tech investors really are too risk averse?