It gets philosophical, but founders equity has a lot of characteristics that I’m sure the government was not thinking of when they made the Roth IRA rules. For

It gets philosophical, but founders equity has a lot of characteristics that I’m sure the government was not thinking of when they made the Roth IRA rules. For example, Thiel’s time was a massive reason for him getting the equity he did, so he was able to use $x of Roth IRA money and $100*x of his labor to transfer value into his Roth. What most people have to do is trade their labor for money, then transfer a capped amount of money into the Roth, and use that small amount to invest. On top of that, as the other commenter said, founders equity doesn’t see the light of the market to have a fair value. And it wouldn’t shock me if Thiel waited until it was obvious PayPal would succeed (i.e. if presented to the market, his shares would be massively valuable) to transfer the stock in.