AJ Sadauskas on Nostr: npub1eey5p…ff0kr Fun fact: in many jurisdictions, you don't pay capital gains on ...

npub1eey5p8h4r2y8tamkjjxv7mye4lqgsga2enhkf67dlxezrdmur08saff0kr (npub1eey…f0kr) Fun fact: in many jurisdictions, you don't pay capital gains on the income you own on shares until you sell them.

So here's a purely hypothetical example, written with no specific individual in mind. Any resemblance to any real-world examples is pure coincidence.

So imagine you and your business partner start a little software company (with a little help from your mum and dad), and you retain a 50% stake.

Now let's imagine this personal computer thing really goes mainstream. People who don't have computer science PhDs even start to use them.

Your little startup benefits from a combination of good business contacts at IBM (thanks again mum and dad), a knockoff of CP/M that some hobbyist wrote based on a manual, copying some design decisions that Steve Jobs copied from Xerox, and a few questionable business moves that the US Department of Justice will later raise in court.

A couple of decades and an antitrust suit for anti-competitive behaviour later, your little tech company grows to a market cap of $100 billion.

Congratulations! Your 50% stake is now worth $50 billion!

At this point, you haven't had to pay tax on that $50 billion worth of shares, because it's an unrealised capital gain.

It's a huge amount of wealth, but the problem is it's all tied up in one company.

And given your firm's increasing reputation for poor cybersecurity practices and regulatory interest on at least two continents, you decide it's prudent to diversify your investments.

In this purely hypothetical scenario, you really have two choices.

You can sell off your shares. But if you do, you're likely to face a truly astronomical capital gains tax bill. We're talking tens of billions of dollars here.

Or.

You could form a tax exempt charitable foundation that you control, and donate all your shares to it.

Not only do you get out of that capital gains tax bill, but you still get to control the capital you accumulated through your foundation.

An added bonus, if your accountant is good, is that you might also potentially get a massive tax credit that will basically wipe out any income tax you may need to pay in the future.

The only real catch is that you do need to donate a portion of the wealth in your foundation to charitable causes.

But you get to pick which ones.

And not only will the amounts you have to donate be smaller than your capital gains tax bill would have been, but you also get lauded for being a visionary humanitarian.

Oh, and one more perk.

Should you choose to do so, you just make sure your kids take over running your foundation when you're done, and they'll get to control the wealth you accumulated—without any pesky estate taxes!

(They can honestly say they only inherited a few million from you, while they run your multi-billion-dollar foundation to boot!)

This is a pure hypothetical, of course...