Right, although it wasn't that they were illegally acquired it's that he illegally undervalued them. Him being a cofounder just explains how he had enough power in the cap structure to put an unreasonably low number on them, it doesn't make it allowable. And obviously someone in the organization was uncomfortable enough with it that they included the fact in the SEC filing, just no one connected the dots till now.
I think this was reported on in 2009. Congress held hearings and a report was issued. Nothing changed. There is something wrong when you can shelter a few billions from ANY taxes. #1. Only allow publicly traded issues in these accounts. #2. At some point, you reach a limit on how much is in the account and you then have to take RMD's. Make it a high #, maybe $10m. RMD's would be based on your life expectancy. But that would too easy and fair.
Even if he would have valued the shares at the valuation of the last private round he would have had to list them orders of magnitude higher (and thus only been able to put a fraction of the number of shares under Roth protection). There is definitely some ambiguity in private company valuation and the public share restriction you mentioned makes good sense. But in this case it was just pure fraud, there was no justification for that valuation which the company even admits in it's contemporary SEC filing. Thiel broke the existing law, plain and simple, and he knew exactly what he was doing. He needs to go to jail and pay a massive fine plus back taxes, penalties, and interest, just like the poor schmuck who only lists $25,000 in income even though he made $75,000. A tax cheat is a tax cheat.
The guy is a great entrepreneur and VC, maybe he's a good author as well I haven't read that book. How does that excuse blatant cheating on ones taxes though?
%% WELL that may make up for all the many IPOs that were overpriced + dropped from day 1. That CA prof may be dumb enough\ like many of them are; they teach capital markets are like pie + he took those profits out of peoples pockets. LOL. Actually capital markets are like = anybody can start a bakery......................................... Thanks
Wtf are you talking about? Everything you just said is gibberish and nothing to do with the point that he bought shares below market value.