You would want someone who is intimately familiar with the culture to be involved for a long time in case something happened to Warren.

The money he is giving away is going to foundations managed by his children (last I read).

I wonder if there's a survivorship bias there: those who can and do reject the status quo.

It’s not really a “loophole,” it’s a standard way to give away absurd sums of money.

Have you ever tried to donate billions of dollars? It’s actually extremely difficult.

You have to find causes you’re passionate about/things that society needs, find the correct charities to give the money to, make sure your money actually goes towards the thing they say it will (this is difficult), and then figure out how much you can actually donate (you can’t just give N dollars to company Y. They’ve got zero experience managing that much money, and no way to scale into doing it efficiently.)

What happens then is you have $100b to donate, and mostly only do it $10m at a time or less.

Warren’s kids are old now. They’ve all been donating money for YEARS (it’s a mandatory part of their trust).

So yeah, you receive tax benefits by transferring shares to a foundation you also control, but that money is now earmarked for charity. It doesn’t flow both ways, and the laws on this are very tight (bad actors will find a way, but what’s new?).

Right, donating your present wealth because you expect to continue receiving an astronomical amount of wealth in perpetuity through your company ownership is not all that grand of a gesture.

Certainly better than many alternatives, but it’s not a gesture that should make the median income person feel like existing as an excessively wealthy person should be okay/legal.

In my opinion, personal wealth/asset control above a certain level deemed excessive (perhaps $100 million then adjusted for inflation moving forward) should be taxed at 100% and put into a special fund intended to help pay for social services, healthcare, housing the homeless, etc. In the case of asset control perhaps a good method would be to distribute excessively valued ownership stakes to employees or random members of the public (e.g., many of Elon Musk’s shares in his companies forfeited and distributed to others).

For what it is worth, if you want your withdrawals to last for decades, then you are limited to around a yearly inflation-adjusted cap of around 3% of the original principal per year, gross of taxes, if you invest in low-cost passive index funds. That is a budget of $30K/year for every million you have invested in the market.

If you are interested, the /r/fire and /r/financialindependence subreddits are useful.

Exactly! They elected a 71 year old nepo baby to run the company. Vastly different.

We live in neo feudalism. The hard part is getting to a billion but once you do your family will be part of the elite for centuries.

I actually asked GPT that question some time ago.

The importance of top executive decisions is overstated, they often do no better than random chance. But their decisions are not where their value lies.

The important part is that they own their decisions, or at least appear to do so. And in doing that, they gain trust for the company, they are the company face. It is more of a performance than a technical job. By that, I don't mean it is fake, people will notice if you don't know what you are talking about, and it won't inspire confidence, which is what leaders try to avoid at all costs.

LLMs will probably be at least as good at decision making (I mean, that's almost a dice roll), and they can be convincing, which is important too, but they are completely lacking in the trust department. No one want to work for a machine, no one want to do business negotiations with a machine either. That's why it is important to have a human on top.