Facebook Co-Founder Saverin Gives Up U.S. Citizenship Before IPO 911
parallel_prankster writes "Bloomberg reports that Eduardo Saverin, the billionaire co- founder of Facebook, has renounced his U.S. citizenship before an initial public offering that values the social network at as much as $96 billion, a move that may reduce his tax bill. From the article: 'Facebook plans to raise as much as $11.8 billion through the IPO, the biggest in history for an Internet company. Saverin's stake is about 4 percent, according to the website Who Owns Facebook. At the high end of the IPO valuation, that would be worth about $3.84 billion. Saverin, 30, joins a growing number of people giving up U.S. citizenship, a move that can trim their tax liabilities in that country. Saverin won't escape all U.S. taxes. Americans who give up their citizenship owe what is effectively an exit tax on the capital gains from their stock holdings, even if they don't sell the shares, said Reuven S. Avi-Yonah, director of the international tax program at the University of Michigan's law school. For tax purposes, the IRS treats the stock as if it has been sold.'"
Wimp (Score:5, Funny)
Of course, now that I think about it, he might have had to spend an entire year dead to realize any tax benefit from it. I'm sure you could manage that sort of thing when you're worth a few billion dollars!
Re:Wimp (Score:5, Funny)
It's the same dodge Walt Disney's been up to.
You could go even further back (Score:5, Funny)
What if you reduced the government back to its size in 1776? Imagine how much money you'd save personally if you didn't buy food!
Re:Unfair taxes ! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:When they say they're only going to tax the ric (Score:5, Funny)
Implement a 90% exit tax. Problem solved. If you really hate the country, you're free to leave. But if you're only leaving because you've received the benefits of living here and now want to skip out on the check, well fuck you.
Re:Unfair taxes ! (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Going Galt (Score:4, Funny)
I love the way you throw around the word productive a though it meant anything other than rich. I love the way Ayn Randers equate productive with "reaching the apex of a money-making hierarchy" as though that had a god fucking thing to do with being "productive".
What a fucking joke,. If being well positioned in society were in any way related to "being productive" then every woman in Africa would be a millionaire, a point that was made here:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/nov/07/one-per-cent-wealth-destroyers [guardian.co.uk]
If wealth was the inevitable result of hard work and enterprise, every woman in Africa would be a millionaire.
The claims that the ultra-rich 1% make for themselves â" that they are possessed of unique intelligence or creativity or drive â" are examples of the self-attribution fallacy. This means crediting yourself with outcomes for which you weren't responsible.
Many of those who are rich today got there because they were able to capture certain jobs. This capture owes less to talent and intelligence than to a combination of the ruthless exploitation of others and accidents of birth, as such jobs are taken disproportionately by people born in certain places and into certain classes.
The findings of the psychologist Daniel Kahneman, winner of a Nobel economics prize, are devastating to the beliefs that financial high-fliers entertain about themselves.
He discovered that their apparent success is a cognitive illusion. For example, he studied the results achieved by 25 wealth advisers across eight years.
He found that the consistency of their performance was zero.
"The results resembled what you would expect from a dice-rolling contest, not a game of skill."
Those who received the biggest bonuses had simply got lucky.
Such results have been widely replicated. They show that traders and fund managers throughout Wall Street receive their massive remuneration for doing no better than would a chimpanzee flipping a coin. When Kahneman tried to point this out, they blanked him.
"The illusion of skill ⦠is deeply ingrained in their culture."
The CEO f my company made 86 million a year I made 86k. That means his labor was 1000 times more productive than my own. Since I worked not less than 12 hours a day, it's hard to imagine how it could be true. Obviously such people could recreate the last 1000 years of human progress in just one year. Well, at least they think so.
The idea that some cokehead " Hey, I made a yearbook-on-the-internet" "genius" is somehow one of society's "most productive members" is such a joke that we just have to say that anyone who seriously entertains the idea is irremediably idiotic.