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Man Becomes Overnight Millionaire After Meteorite Crashes Through His Roof
- namanaggarwal 6y agoDo you need to pay capital gains tax on such winnings (or may be some other tax). How will one declare the source.
- csunbird 6y agoI assume that the procedure would be the like as you had discovered oil or gold mine in your property.
- kristopolous 6y agoIANAL and certainly not a tax lawyer but I believe this one is easy. In the US, the treasure trove case https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cesarini_v._United_States https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cesarini_v._United_States ... This also covers found precious metal on property and I'd imagine when these precious goods arrived isn't important, only when you found them. Here's an example of it in action; arguably a pretty similar case to a precious metal falling out of the sky: https://www.forbes.com/sites/robertwood/2014/02/26/couple-finds-10-million-in-gold-coins-taxes-take-half/?sh=4369363948f9 https://www.forbes.com/sites/robertwood/2014/02/26/couple-fi.... Apparently the numismatists of the world have a name for this stash if you're interested: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saddle_Ridge_Hoard https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saddle_Ridge_Hoard
- dmurray 6y agoI don't think this is right. Treasure trove covers finding money on your property. Refined precious metals (gold and silver particularly) are historically and legally treated as money for many purposes. But a gold mine isn't. This seems to me more like discovering a gold mine. You can't buy things with your meteorite, or divide it indefinitely into smaller pieces that keep their value pro rata. Even if it was filled with platinum ore, you'd need to smelt and refine it. The tax treatment of treasure trove in the US is different from the treatment of discovering gold or oil: in brief, you owe taxes when you find it, instead of when you sell it or its products. Edit: another legal question, what if you don't own the mineral rights under your own home?
- kristopolous 6y agoSorry I certainly cannot actually defend a position. I have no expertise in tax law. Hopefully someone with the appropriate knowledge can enlighten us
- analog31 6y agoYes, 4.5 billion years qualifies as a long term capital gain.
- dahart 6y agoIn Indonesia (where the man who found the meteorite lives), “Capital gains are considered ordinary income and are taxed at the standard corporate income tax rate.“ according to https://www2.deloitte.com/content/dam/Deloitte/global/Documents/Tax/dttl-tax-indonesiahighlights-2019.pdf https://www2.deloitte.com/content/dam/Deloitte/global/Docume...
- ISL 6y agoThat's the kind of lottery that requires buying zero tickets :).
- garbagetime 6y agoBuying tickets would render one ineligible?
- anonymou2 6y agoIs it more, less or equally probably to win the lottery? If it is the same or less there is no need to buy lottery tickets, we are all playing all the time :-)
- dmurray 6y agoMuch less likely. Thousands of people win $1 million or more in lotteries every year. Only a handful have their houses hit by million-dollar meteorites.
- dredmorbius 6y agoExtended over a sufficient time interval, odds increase markedly. Though the events themselves may effect market function and hence price. https://io9.gizmodo.com/why-youre-more-likely-to-die-from-a-meteor-strike-than-5839058 https://io9.gizmodo.com/why-youre-more-likely-to-die-from-a-...
- simonh 6y agoIts more like everyone getting one lottery ticket for free, but with the option of buying more. Anyway I suspect people winning lotteries is more frequent that people having meteorites hit their house.
- thih9 6y ago> one lottery ticket for free One lottery ticket for free for each property you own. I guess it could be ten, or zero. I don't know what happens when a property is being rented though. E.g. Alice rents a house to Bob, they just signed the papers, suddenly they hear a crash and a meteorite lands on the table. Who can claim it? Edit: I've found the answer at https://www.spacelegalissues.com/space-law-meteorites-and-their-legal-status/ https://www.spacelegalissues.com/space-law-meteorites-and-th... "What about meteorites and their legal status? Legal solutions similar to the French one can be found in Morocco (the meteorites belong to those who find them), in Japan (the property of meteorites can be acquired by occupation), in England (the meteorite belongs to the landowner) or in the United States of America. However, any meteorite that has fallen on any part of the U.S. federal land (lands in the United States of America owned by the federal government) is insusceptible of private property, since it belongs de jure to the federal government."
- Hnrobert42 6y agoI wonder why they are storing it in liquid nitrogen.
- boomboomsubban 6y agoAir is caustic, and depending on the exact type these meteorites can crumble very quickly.
- adamjb 6y agoHe tells the BBC a very different story. >"Saya jual Rp200 juta, ternyata harganya Rp26 miliar" >"I sold it for 200 million rupiah (~$16k USD), it turned out to be worth 26 billion rupiah (~$1.8M USD)" >Uang itu pun sudah habis dibagi-bagi kepada keluarga, yatim piatu, gereja, dan perbaikan makam orangtua >The money has been distributed towards families, orphans, churches and fixing parents' graves. >"Uangnya sudah habis, cuma Rp200 juta" >"The money is already gone, only 200 million rupiah" >"Kalau betul (harganya) Rp26 miliar, saya merasa dibohongi. Saya kecewa." >If it's true (that it's worth) 26 billion rupiah, I feel lied to. I am disappointed." https://www.bbc.com/indonesia/majalah-54996882 https://www.bbc.com/indonesia/majalah-54996882
- monoideism 6y agoI doubt it's worth anywhere near a million pounds, but the article does say that the buyer immediately resold it to a collector, so I suspect it could have been worth considerably more than the $16 000 he got.
- cher88 6y agoBased on the BBC article in the parent comment, the buyer wasn’t actually a buyer / reseller but just a middleman representing the collector. And he said that though he wasn’t privy to the price paid, it wasn’t $16K but was also not as much as $1M. He also said no meteorite is worth $1M.
- m-i-l 6y agoThat's awful if true. I guess technically the headline is still correct if you're talking about a millionaire in Rupiah terms (but 1 million Rupiah is only about USD 70). So is the man who became a millionaire (in dollar terms) the collector from the USA?
- pmiller2 6y agoI would guess someone who's spending $16K on a meteorite is probably already very well off, if not a millionaire.
- oriesdan 6y agoSo basically, on a planet whose surface is covered mainly by oceans, a meteorite fall in an urban area, is big enough not to disintegrate in the atmosphere and small enough not to blow the house and kill the man (I mean, what happened to craters?), and it suddenly makes him rich. I'm not a religious person myself but I totally get why this man decided to build a church. I just hope he won't make it any weirder by proclaiming himself a chosen one or something, because there's room for that.
- chrismorgan 6y agoI don’t get the impression that the proposed church is connected in any way to the meteor or himself as a personality, but since you raise the point: Some time around 54 AD, silversmiths started a riot in Ephesus because their trade in idols was being threatened by people listening to Paul’s teachings of Jesus as Christ; then Acts 19:35 says: > And when the town clerk had quieted the crowd, he said, “Men of Ephesus, who is there who does not know that the city of the Ephesians is temple keeper of the great Artemis, and of the sacred stone that fell from the sky? (The town clerk’s speech was largely, “c’mon, guys, you know better than to throw a tantrum/riot over this—use the legal system if you’ve got a complaint”.) There’s some uncertainty as to exactly what that meant and referred to, but it would seem to suggest that a meteorite had come to be an important part of their worship.
- FooBarBizBazz 6y agoThat's interesting, thanks. Your post motivated me to google... Wikipedia has a list of uses of meteoric iron dating to 2.5k BC and earlier: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meteoric_iron https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meteoric_iron The earliest dagger listed there seems to come from the Hattian people of Anatolia: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hattians https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hattians It sounds like they were a pre-Indo-European group later absorbed/conquered by the Hittites...
- driverdan 6y agoThe law of large numbers says this should happen regularly.
- RandomWorker 6y agoThese Stones contain lots of organic matter and water, they will degrade quickly on earth. I suspect that research on these objects is very rare to have such a fresh sample. Probably it does not have this value because of rare metals or something, however because of its freshness has tremendous research value.
- pengaru 6y agoMy understanding is meteorites have potentially high value because they're increasingly viewed as equivalent to samples collected from foreign planets/asteroids. Viewed through that lens, the value competes with the cost of retrieving a sample from wherever the meteorite formed.
- la6471 6y agoHow did this rock made it to the surface! Most of them burn up in the atmosphere so this must have been pretty big originally. Any idea if others are following?
- FlyMoreRockets 6y ago> Any idea if others are following? Well, we did just finish the Leonids meteor shower and the Geminids meteror shower is coming up in around a month, so the answer to your question would be "yes". https://www.timeanddate.com/astronomy/meteor-shower/ https://www.timeanddate.com/astronomy/meteor-shower/
- mturmon 6y agoHere's a great in-depth news article from Science on a different carbonaceous chondrite strike, in Costa Rica, that touches on the same bargaining issue: https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/08/unusual-meteorite-more-valuable-gold-may-hold-building-blocks-life https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/08/unusual-meteorite-mo... I believe it's not paywalled. If you enjoyed OP, this one adds a lot of local color on the finders, the buyers, and the science.
- Voloskaya 6y ago> Josua Hutagalung, 33, is a coffin maker > he indicated that the amount was over 1 million pounds. > With the money he has received - estimated to be equivalent to 30 years worth of his salary Which brings his yearly salary at 44K USD. Are coffin makers in extremly high demand in Indonesia? Or is the average salary in Indonesia much, much higher than I thought? Edit: Reading other comments, the simpler and much sadder explanation is that he actually did not sold it for 1M pounds at all.
- cmwelsh 6y agoWhat if he had been renting the property?