It’s a pretty common practice. Microsoft spend 10 billion on OpenAI, but how much of that do you think makes it back into Microsoft through the Azure compute ti

It’s a pretty common practice. Microsoft spend 10 billion on OpenAI, but how much of that do you think makes it back into Microsoft through the Azure compute time OpenAI buys? I think a lot of people who haven’t been involved with business laws (not sure what the correct English term would be) would genuinely be surprised with just how much you can do. I work in an investment bank, we manage around 1100 companies which are in reality investment projects. A couple of these are tied directly to ourself, so that we have a top shell company which owns the actual companies. One is an employee shell company which allows our employees to spend 14,5% of their yearly income on company shares, before taxes. Up to a certain amount of these can be sold at a 25% tax rate, it’s around $9000 a year that can be earned at a tax rate which is around 20% lower than the normal income tax rate ours employees pay. It also deducts from the amount of money they can earn before every thing they earn above that rate is taxed at almost 60%. On top of this, if they are married they can also use the $9000 of their spouse (if their spouse isn’t doing similar) and another $9000 for their household, because well, because the people who write/lobby these things are good at what they do. Anyway… it’s perfectly legal, even here in Scandinavia, and it’s maybe something 99% of our population has no idea exists. And that’s just for employee benefits. You wouldn’t believe the stuff we do with our investment projects. I’m not going to tell you any of the current things, but at one point our government wanted to promote small businesses and made <=10 owner companies almost tax-exempt. Meaning that a good deal of our still running projects pay almost no tax on the revenue they generate. Including when a project is eventually sold, even though the law has since been rectified so that it’s impossible to do this for new companies and there is a grace period for when it ends for existing companies. I square it with my personal morals because every project is either a solar park that was build or a solar park that was bought and renovated to be capable of running another 25-50 years instead of being scrapped. But on a whole… it’s just so ridiculous compared to what “regular” people do. Like… a Danish Nurse in the public sector (and honestly in virtually every private hospital/company) has none of these benefits. Often because even business owners outside of finance (or companies large enough to have big legal departments) has no clues these things exist. But in terms of income, our legal department sometimes generate almost as much revenue as our sales department now that we have as many projects as we do around the globe.