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
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Replying to @robertwiblin
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.
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Replying to @robertwiblin
Capital gains is a tax on the *profit* from a sale, while a wealth tax hits the current value of stock. Even with crazy high capital gains —say 90% — if your stock gains *any* value, you won't lose money. With a 3% wealth tax, anything under a 3% return is effectively a loss.
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Replying to @robertwiblin
At reasonable levels & typical returns, it absolutely is favorable, particularly if the rest of the tax structure enables your company to pay you enough to cover the tax or if can borrow at a good rate...
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But tech is weird; valuations & failure rates are simultaneously MASSIVE. To take an extreme example, if you owned a 5% stake in Theranos at its peak, you'd be paying $15M/year for it, and of course it would've turned out all that wealth was entirely illusory anyway.
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