TL;DR Some entrepreneurs care about tax. Others don't. But they will care when they start making money. COMMENT Well, Mark Cuban says he doesn't care. Let

TL;DR Some entrepreneurs care about tax. Others don't. But they will care when they start making money. COMMENT Well, Mark Cuban says he doesn't care. Let's take him at face value. His opinion is a statistical sample based on a data set of N = 1. I have multiple clients who in fact do care and are scrambling to rearrange their lives -- and in a few cases give up U.S. citizenship -- in 2012 because of it. Off the top of my head, that is a data set of let's say N = 6. I don't win either. My anecdotal evidence means nothing, just as much as pointing at Mark Cuban means nothing. What does matter is common sense: -- people have different levels of caring; and -- someone might not care about taxes when profits are zero, but they will care later. An entrepreneur starting a venture truly doesn't care about tax -- all that matters is eating and sleeping in a warm, dry place every night. Later in the venture's life cycle, however, tax costs matter. And they matter in a huge way. Then when you get to juggernaut-sized businesses (think Apple, Google, General Electric, etc.) there are small armies of people worrying about tax. The government has permanent people assigned to specific companies, and the companies of course have their people. We're not talking the juggernauts. We're talking about people who are on HN and take something from idea to reality. In the process they get wealthy, if they're lucky. When it comes time to sell (if that's the exit) or it comes time to live comfortably off the cash flow (if that's the plan), you bet they will care about taxes. I think Mark Cuban's statement speaks only for his own feelings a few days before an election, for public consumption purposes. I'm pretty sure he's looked at his income tax returns, seen the "Tax Due" line, and uttered epithets like a pirate. :-) Despite what he says in that blog post.