Mason  🏃‍♂️ ✂️

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?

If other investors really are too risk averse why are they keeping these founders around? We could also do a carve-out if this mattered a lot where founders can sign over dividends and capital gains on 3% of their equity each year while retaining voting rights on the shares.

(1) Boards are typically so hesitant to oust founders that it's hard to know what conclusions you can draw from those cases. Softer power shifts are very tough to look at. Successful VCs are very pro-founder. Maybe the entire system is wrong, but it's not a test I wanna run live.