4 ms·

I guarantee you he wouldn’t have transferred it to you for $1 despite the fact that you claim that’s well in excess of its value

• missedthecue 5y ago
  Thiel personally considered Paypal to be very valuable, and he turned out to be right. But his personal opinion about how much the firm was (going to be) worth is not the same thing as the actual value of the firm. Tim Cook might think that AAPL is worth $1000 a share, but it's not against the law for him to fill his IRA with Apple shares.
  • acdha 5y ago
    It would, however, be against the law for Cook to claim $20,000 worth of shares were $2,000 so he could stay under the limit. The same is true for Thiel: a private company doesn’t have such an easy way to document market value but he had insider knowledge suggesting that $0.0001/share was low, as their own SEC filings acknowledged. I would prefer that the fix be to set a tax-free cap (e.g. pay capital gains on returns over $10M) but I suspect that kind of example will get the most attention because it’s pretty clear that he low-balled it and even if that’s perfectly legal it won’t seem fair to the vast majority of the population who never have access to pre-IPO shares, much less the ability to claim their own valuation.