Slashdot Mirror
The Zuckerberg Tax
Hugh Pickens writes "David S. Miller writes that when Facebook goes public later this year, Mark Zuckerberg plans to exercise stock options worth $5 billion of the $28 billion that his ownership stake will be worth and since the $5 billion he will receive will be treated as salary, Zuckerberg will have a tax bill of more than $2 billion making him, quite possibly, the largest taxpayer in history. But how much income tax will Zuckerberg pay on the rest of his stock that he won't immediately sell? Nothing, nada, zilch. He can simply use his stock as collateral to borrow against his tremendous wealth and avoid all tax. That's what Lawrence J. Ellison, the chief executive of Oracle, did, reportedly borrowing more than a billion dollars against his Oracle shares to buy one of the most expensive yachts in the world. Or consider the case of Steven P. Jobs who never sold a single share of Apple after he rejoined the company in 1997, and therefore never paying a penny of tax on the over $2 billion of Apple stock he held at his death. Now Jobs' widow can sell those shares without paying any income tax on the appreciation before his death — only on the increase in value from the time of his death to the time of the sale — because our tax system is based on the concept of "realization." Individuals are not taxed until they actually sell property and realize their gains and the solution to the problem is called mark-to-market taxation. According to Miller, mark-to-market would only affect individuals who were undeniably, extraordinarily rich, only publicly traded stock would be marked to market, and a mark-to-market system of taxation on the top one-tenth of 1 percent would raise hundreds of billions of dollars of new revenue over the next 10 years."
Of course she didn't, because she was his wife and as such, the co-owner of his property.
Capital gains is a tax on the INCREASE in value. The BASE is not taxed a second time.
If you invest $100 and you realize a gain of $50 on that, then the $50 is taxed as capital gains but the $100 is not taxed a second time.
Er, scratch that previous comment. Should have read the article. The people are moving out because their share holdings are being taxed. So the French wealth tax does have a negative effect.
The English word fart is one of the oldest words in the English vocabulary.
As for the borrowing stuff - how is that supposed to work? So Ellison borrows against his shares (fair enough) and buys something with it. So now he has to pay back the loan. That payment needs to come from income, and for that he pays tax. Seems fair.
Nah, you're not being nearly creative enough. Ellison has no income, you see, so he can't pay back his loan, so the bank collects on the collateral, cancels the loan, and now Ellison has $1 billion and the bank has $ 1.05 billion in stock (or whatever). Easy peasy.
Jobs is dead, and as some would have it, God created him.
He was a Buddhist (not a very good one), he has no God.
I'm certain this'll be modded down with the current spate of fanboy moderation going on.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.