FIVE THOUSAND YEARS LATER…
[your body is invalid, buddy!]
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so yeah, don’t hate the playa, hate the game.
if zuck went to some financial planner and the planner did not suggest this course of action, then maybe the planner is negligent. but zuck didn’t have to take his/her advice.
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Now how likely is that. Um, wait a minute…
Hating anyone involved may be part of a normal range of feelings for people who work hard and also, maybe, have a lot of debt service or rent that feels way too high.
More generally constructive would be these things:
Petitioning to make the economy more democratic and fair by debt restructuring and relief for working people, removing barriers to democratically regulating corporations, investigating profiteers — open source ice cream — public transportation options, single payer health care, subsidized child care, infill development and democratic price/rent control.
I slipped in the one about ice cream. I’m fun like that.
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it is an expression meant to mean that the financial planner and perhaps even zuck are blameless. if someone else sets out the rules (“the game”) then the players just play by those rules, making them merely rational actors. in other words if you don’t like what’s happening then you need to change the game, not hate on the players.
That’s not a moon… Wait, yes, yes it is.
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That’s not him avoiding tax, that’s his company.
If he did instruct FB’s CFO to avoid any tax loopholes and liability reduction strategies it would likely result in a shareholder lawsuit. The fix isn’t for companies to be nice and pay tax they can avoid, it’s to fix the tax laws.
A “massive gift to himself”?? Yeah, what a horrible person to designate 99% of his wealth to try and make the world better.
Would you prefer he ask us to devote our resources to building the Zuckerberg plaza?
And don’t forget that if you use FB then you’re the one who gave Zuckerberg those resources in the first place.
[quote=“anon50609448, post:16, topic:70193”]
And all of that is not to mention that if he did just plain give away $45B that would be less of a hardship for him than it would be for you or I to give change to someone we pass on the street.[/quote]
You seriously just claimed that him giving away 99% of his wealth is less of a strain than one of us giving away pocket change??
I’m sorry but that’s ridiculous. Yes he’s still very, very rich. But you know what? There’s lots of very, very rich people, and there’s lots of businesses dedicated to finding things for them to spend that money on. Mansions and fancy apartments, private jets, private islands, yachts, personal staffs, sports franchises, etc. If you had $45 billion I suspect you’d suddenly realize how many $30 million dollars there were that you’d really like to own.
Plus there’s the fact that $45 billion basically guarantees his descendants have several generations of essentially being American royalty.
Yes him giving away 99% doesn’t hurt remotely as much as it would for one of us, none is claiming otherwise. But it’s still a ridiculously large gesture on his part.
Seriously I find the criticism here to be absurd. This is a young guy with an absurd amount of money declaring that he’s going to devote a huge majority of that money to making the world a better place. Whatever you think of the other stuff he’s done this was a very good, generous, and meaningful gesture.
In fact I’m going to go out on the world’s tiniest limb and claim that no one here, if they had $45 billion dollars, would publicly earmark 99% of it for public good.
“The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative” – For some reason the way that sounds makes me feel all futury and 2015. They could’ve been the bad guys in a dystopian SciFi novel, in line with Weyland-Yutani and Tessier-Ashpool.
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Could also be an episode title for The Big Bang Theory.
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I was also thinking chess opening. “Ah, the cheeky monkey is trying to play the Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative. I’ve got some nice moves for you, buddy.”
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I didn’t either, and I studied the subject only ten years ago. This must be a new form of evil. Philanthropic giving is nice, but so is a solid tax base.
ceeerk… creeeeek… CRACK!
BOOM!
“Wooooh! That was quite a fall, are you ok?! What in the world made you think that tiny branch could hold the weight of your lofty and condescending moral superiority?”
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“Several”!!?!
I think you foresee foppish aristocrats bathing in rare champagne, leading foppish and wasteful existences!
If he owned some sort of global-scale misinformation distribution network, then I might be a bit suspicious…
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The rules for an economy ought to be more and more democratic, not plutocratic — and certainly not existential.
Corporate beneficiaries like Mr. Zuckerberg have supported restructuring FB and the taxpayer supported internet as a hellish corporate panopticon. He supports socializing private costs and privatizing public gains.
So, yes, he’s behaved questionably.
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It’s pretty arrogant of him to think that he knows how to make the world better.
Also, it may not be valid to draw parallels from other wealthy “philanthropists”, but Bill Gates’s plan for improving US education seems to involve legally requiring the nation’s schools to buy a fuckton of Microsoft machines. Should we expect a similar interpretation of “making the world better” from Zuckerburg?
There’s no obligation for anyone to contribute if Zuckerburg sticks his money into some private investment. He’s spending $45 billion to try to influence public policy. (See mini-rant about Bill Gates’s influence on public policy above.)
Maybe not psychologically, but he’s still more financially sound after giving away 99% of his wealth than, oh 99.9999% of the world’s population. Not much of a sacrifice IMHO.
The supposition among many of Zuckerburg’s critics seems to me that his declarations about making the world a better place are bullshit. Whether this is a “good, generous, and meaningful gesture” depends very much on whether you are correct that he is sincere or they are correct that he is not.
But even if he is sincere, good intentions don’t always imply good outcomes. There’s even an English-language idiom or two about this phenomenon.
Good thing none of us are in a position to prove you wrong on this, huh?
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I didn’t claim it, I point it out. If you give away any amount of money and still have $1B left over then it was absolutely no hardship to you at all. You can still have anything you want. The possibilities afforded by an extra $45B are completely outside the realm of the possible for anyone who has to work to pay for food, clothing and housing.
People tend to see in other people what they think of themselves. So other than declaring that you wouldn’t do it, you haven’t said much here. There is simply nothing to buy for that much money except for a legacy. Basically, what he’s done here is found a way to avoid paying taxes on this money so he could spend it on what he was going to spend it on anyway. Bill Gates set up a fund to develop and AIDS vaccine. You’d rather horde that money so that you could have more mansions, more yachts, and that people born 100 years from now who share more than an average amount of DNA with you could live spoiled lives? What the fuck kind of priorities are those?
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“His P.R. return-on-investment dwarfs that of his Facebook stock.”
Can someone explain to me how any PR return could ever be valued at vastly more (“dwarfs”) than $45B? That sentence made me assume that all the sentences packed around it were of questionable value.
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Try to think of what you could buy for $45B. Unless you are thinking of major infrastructure problems or something like “curing death” you probably aren’t even thinking of spending a tiny fraction of that money. The only thing available to buy for that much money is PR (or a “legacy” or whatever). And, of course, Zuckerburg didn’t actually spend any money on this. He avoided paying taxes on a bunch of money so he could spend it on the things he wants to spend it on.
Steve Martin had a joke: “If you have a dollar and you spend 50 cents on a loaf of bread, you have 50 cents left. But if you have 17 grand and you spend 50 cents on a loaf of bread, you still have 17 grand. That’s math!”
As Zuckerburg is showing us, if you have $45B and you spend $45B then you still have $45B and you don’t have to pay capital gains tax. That is math.
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[quote=“Humbabella, post:39, topic:70193”]
He avoided paying taxes on a bunch of money[/quote]
Huh. That is exactly the opposite of what’s reported in the story. Herre’s part of the Z quote from the story: “And just like everyone else, we will pay capital gains taxes when our shares are sold by the LLC.”
Of course, he could be flat-out lying through his teeth, but that doesn’t seem like a very likely hypothesis.
(Also, even if we accept at face value the “he is lying” hypothesis, I still don’t see how any kind of PR could ever be valued at $45B with a straight face.)
