What Happens When Tony Hsieh Dies with $1B, with No Estate Planning(williamhalaw.com) |
What Happens When Tony Hsieh Dies with $1B, with No Estate Planning(williamhalaw.com) |
I’d never thought of it this way, but it’s a thought provoking reality.
Insane! On the one hand this mistake is a rare case of the rich paying a lot of tax. But very odd not to have tried to avoid this by (whatever rich people do)
In a better world, people would just laugh at anyone who tried to claim this (or, better yet, try to help them with their mental/social problem).
The difference in actual material wealth between the rich and the poor isn't that excessive today. Beyond a certain threshold you're only buying novelty. And the gap is shrinking every year.
1. Things have value.
2. People can own things, fractionally or entirely.
3. Owning a thing entails control of that thing.
So what does a world in which billionaires aren't allowed to exist look like? If the wealth is from creating a company, do we tax companies so progressively that it simply isn't possible for a billion-dollar company to exist in the first place? Do we take some fraction of the founder's company, and therefore their control over that company, away, e.g. with a wealth tax?
In principle I'm happy to ban billionaires, but I also don't love the idea of someone losing control of the company they created because other people decided it was too valuable. Asymptotically capping the growth of companies is appealing, but who knows what the second-order market effects might be (imagine if Apple had no incentive to scale to serve everyone who wants their products), and anyway one person can own multiple companies, so per-company limits by themselves won't put an end to billionaires.
The folks in mechanism design have to have done research in this area, but I'm not familiar with it.
At least that's how it can work out in Canada.
It's sad that I wasn't 100% immediately sure this was a typo, but I'm pretty sure it is.
In 2009, Hsieh sold Zappos to Amazon for $1.2 billion. Amazon inherited Hsieh's policy but put its own spin on it — the company offered full-time Amazon fulfillment center workers up to $5,000 to leave, per CNBC.
The policy, dubbed Pay to Quit, is designed to weed out the employees who decide they aren't happy at the company, subsequently improving workforce morale and productivity and ensuring that those who are employed are committed to their work.The real outrage is that this is legal.
As stated it's not exactly accurate.
Your estate is taxed before it goes into a normal trust. To avoid taxes with a trust you have to set it up a long time in advance and slowly shift money in. And at $1B, it's not gonna happen. Even if you use various tricks to put lower priced assets into the trust early and let them appreciate (or e.g. buy permanent life insurance with the trust assets), none of those strategies scale to O($billion)
GSTs used to be able to get around that, but not so much anymore.
A "real" way to avoid it is to put massive amounts into a charity (or occasionally a "charity"), and then have that charity hire your kids for cushy jobs. There are other ways around it too, hiding assets overseas or whatever.
But the article gives a very inaccurate description of using trusts to get around estate taxes. Which is ... weird, right? It's an estate planning attorney? I dunno.
almost infinite permutations are possible
Trying to unfuck estate law is a tourniquet.
We don’t need to curb-stomp the donor class to make them “pay their fair share”, we need to wreck their shit to make the incumbents powerless.
Human nature has a bad memory leak. You have to restart the process sometimes.
If we don’t find a peaceful way to do it, nature will find a violent way to do it.
From today’s front page: https://www.politico.com/news/2023/10/13/open-philanthropy-f....
Anyone have any thoughts on this other than “feels bad man”?
Edit: money kind of represents a debt society owes to the individual. By owning the most money, it actually means that society is most indebted to them, or that they have loaned that many resources/value to society which has not yet been paid back, ironically enough.
You buy $1bn of commercial real estate you get $100m/y to maintain the upkeep in rent. You will be able to get line of credit to cover you for unexpected expense.
You could do that of course. But then you probably don't actually own the resource directly. You probably own the company in the form of shares, similar to money, another tradable token.
You're certainly not using the real estate for yourself like the comment we were replying to was saying. Indeed, if it's being leased then it's probably being used entirely by others!