A fascinating reddit post was mentioned here about a month ago - about the mildly famous (if a little macabre) 'Buy, Borrow, Die' cycle used by the obscenely-wealthy to - multi-generationally - avoid tax obligations.

https://old.reddit.com/r/BuyBorrowDieExplained/comments/1f26...

HN comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41408772

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Matt Levine touched on this briefly today, and I liked his two cents:

>It’s kind of cool? Like you could imagine a hierarchy, in roughly ascending order of wealth:

>Too poor to pay taxes.

>Rich enough to pay taxes.

>Rich enough to not pay taxes.

>Rich enough to not even bother with not paying taxes.

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Pretty obscene that somebody could have so much wealth that $7,000,000,000 is just the tax bill. Also weird that it's framed as a "gift."

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So it was a death-duty style tax - that makes more sense. For a minute I was imagining a lawyer reading a will. "And lastly, I leave my entire 7 billion dollar fortune to... the U.S. Government."

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One of the funny takeaways here is: there are so many more billionaires out there, who spend considerable effort to remain off these lists and otherwise anonymous. I work with one, and he's not on ANY of the Forbes or Bloomberg lists, though articles about his projects and investments obviously make the news. That's, as the article alludes to, the funny thing about private equity: it does a very good job _staying_ private.

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