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Larry & Sergey To Cash In $5.5B of Google Chips
theodp writes "According to an SEC filing, Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin have adopted five-year trading plans to sell about 5M shares each, which would yield each about $2.75B based on Friday's closing stock price of $550.01. BTW, Google kicks in 12 cents to Social Security and another 2 cents to Medicare on its founders' celebrated $1 annual salaries." After this stock is sold, the founders will hold less than 50% of the voting shares and thus will give up voting control of Google.
Even if they have less than 50%, if they have the largest block then in all likelyhood they will still retain control.
Why does it matter if the founders are contributing to SS? They're hardly going to need to draw on it, so everyone else can continue paying in and later drawing out their money. Oh wait, that isn't how SS works? Drat.
...at a much lower tax rate.
Even more so, it seems like Google has been doing some huge changes lately (maybe pulling out of china, android for mobile phones, photographing every street on the planet, current "main guys" and owners starting to sell shares).
Remember that their current stance on privacy (and especially their datamining everywhere) doesn't tell anything how the company will be ran in future. It's even more worry some when the 'geeky' owners sell their shares and leave control to business people.
Er... no. The profits will be taxed as capital gains. The top capital gains rate is 15 percent I believe, and there's no social security or medicare tax on capital gains. So they'll pay tax at a considerably lower rate than someone who works at McDonald's.
Because their salary is $1 and they want to spend some money?
If my salary was $1 and I had over a billion in stocks you best believe I'd be cashing some of it out....
No, I just wish I paid less taxes.
FTFY
One reason is a flat tax, just as sales tax, has a more significant impact on the poor. If the tax rate is 10% and you make $100 a weak, the difference between 100 and 90 is pretty significant. If you make 10,000 a weak, the different between 9000 and 10,000 is far less significant. So, a flat tax is "fair" but only from a certain set of principles.
It'll never happen because the politicians use the tax code for control more than to raise funds.
I'm a leaf on the wind. Watch how I soar.
Why don't we get real for a minute? If these guys were forced to live like they only earned $1 I would agree with you completely. They own the company you moron! They can pay themselves whatever they want without selling the stock. They can also buy anything they want in the name of Google and not pay any taxes on it.
I want to live in your fantasy world. Its 10-25 in federal resort prison for what you just described.
This is crazy. Why are they giving up majority control? I've heard people complain endlessly about how Google could turn into another mindless, profit-at-all-costs-seeking corporation like Microsoft, but I was always secure in the knowledge that the founders had voting control. I just don't understand this. Google rakes in billions in pure profit every year. How could they possibly need more money?
You know what? When it comes to face, I think the rest of the planet needs to make it so they lose face all the time. They need to, untrustworthy gangster scum need to "lose face". We should stop kowtowing to them like that, ALL the time. The only face they really want is your face with their economic and physical boot in it. Screw that.
The Chinese "leaders" are the direct unbroken political descendants of a regime that murdered millions of their own people and engaged in genocide with other people. I have no idea why we even set out on this path to make them richer and more powerful, we wouldn't have done that with the stalinists, nope, nor hitlerites if they were still in power, but for some reason, these murderers get a free pass, like we are just supposed to play make believe history didn't happen and today's reality isn't happening.
The industrialized and more civilized nations (in cahoots with various big business trader traitors and their political puppets) handed them for free, or sold cheap, or they outright stole, and continue to steal, most of the crown jewels of the knowledge and techniques of said industrialization and modernization and *still* we are supposed to be oh so freaking worried about their "face". Well...too bad!
*(*&&*( their dang tyrannical despotic "face", they *need* to "lose face" for being mass jerks. (**&*^ all this bowing and scraping and treating them like they are civilized and honorable. They aren't, they are just modernized thugs, same as they have always been, and getting more powerful daily. They are and have been a major serious threat to the rest of the planet.
The best thing we could do is pull out, make all these stupid global companies just pull the heck out as well, or kick them out, before we are too poor and too far gone into stupid debt, before it is too late to build back up the west's industrial base, the true wealth creation parts of our economies.
That's the main reason we are hurting economically, we let them billionaire traitorous skunks with their despotic allies with their precious "face" swap out our manufacturing for that conman crap about being a "service" economy and emphasizing high stakes casino gambling as some sort of wealth creation "industry". Then they ran that little multi trillion bail out pure extortion racket on top of that!
There's been ZERO quid pro quo budge with them people, no reform inside that nation, no freedoms there except the freedom to be global class crooks, with caveat emptor products, since we handed them the means for wealth creation. All they have done is gone on an around the world grabbing spree, grabing industry after industry, and now raw resource after raw resource, and every time some one dares to point this out, the wall street gangster tools and their chinese mafia brothers cry "protectionism!" BS, they have been "protecting" that cooperating mob gang since day one, it's time for a little more proactive self defense *protection* back.
YEAH! Google should be all about the short term and next quarter's profits! That's how our economy's so strong today!
Steve inherited millions of dollars from his dad, so I'm not sure how you could with a straight face consider him a self-made man. Even his "work" is work that his daddy handed to him, the editorship of Forbes magazine. His daughter Moira also owes her job to the family inheritance--- she's publisher at ForbesLife Executive Women.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10