3 ms·

I don't think you grasp the level of wealth we are talking about. $100B == $3.5M/day over 80 years. Using company property for personal use is a taxable fringe

• derefr 5y ago
  The “average” person who follows these strategies does not have $100B. $5M makes you a Very High Net Worth Individual, and $30M makes you an Ultra High Net Worth Individual, and there are no further categories, because those two points ($5M and $30M) are the points where most — and then all — of these strategies start to make sense. Sure, if you’re one of the fifty people in the world who personally have hundreds of billions in liquid assets, you’ve “escaped” needing to do this sort of thing. But much of the reason that there are so few people who’ve “escaped” this, is that most millionaires don’t aim to just keep getting more liquid assets until they enter this category, because they feel like all the taxation they’d be hit with in the process is “leaving power on the table.” They rather aim to “control” or “leverage” as much money/power as possible at a remove, by minimizing the amount of that that ever personally becomes part of their portfolio. This usually mostly caps their personal net worth (as they’re directing deals to pay into companies they control, rather than ever profiting personally from said deals) but their “social multiplier” on their net worth continues to grow over time. If you’ve ever seen the net-worth curve for some very-obviously-capitalist entrepreneur/VC/investor, and noticed that it plateaus over time — this is what they’re doing. They haven’t quit making money (unless they’ve declared an intent to “switch modes” and spend all their time on spending their money on improving things they care about, like John D. Rockefeller, or Bill Gates.) People who’ve managed to make huge sums of money, tend to love making money; making money is in their blood. They just find, eventually, that making that money personally is no longer a very efficient way of gaining control over ever-larger sums of wealth. > Using company property for personal use is a taxable fringe benefit. Again, the point is to make all “personal use” into business use, by setting up your life so that everything you do is claimable as a business expense by the business, rather than an asset transfer. Sleeping? Managing your hotel. Eating? Managing your restaurant. Getting driven around in a limo? It’s a mobile meeting room where you’re having business meetings! But, to be clear, on the levels that UHNWI people spend money on, these sort of personal expenses aren’t really what I mean by “arranging to control company resources to personal ends.” They’re cute tricks, but they’re not the “big stuff.” The “big stuff” is more like: directing where a corporation will spend its lobbying dollars (business expense), to get petty municipal-planning bills you want passed, so you can have the house you want in the place you want, with the NIMBY rules you want in place (personal end). Or directing a property development company to work with a city to get a certain nascent greenfield area zoned and infrastructure put in (business expense), so that you can then build a house in that area (personal end). Note that in those cases, you don’t gain any asset from the business expense in any legible way. You’re just leveraging your corporate soft power to enable you to do the things you want to do with your own money — to make purchases that would have been impossible, possible. If you’re Jeff Bezos, you can do this out of your own pocket. But most people would find it a lot more efficient to just have those lobbying / property development dollars never go through their bank account.