Yeah, I agree with all that. But I want to clarify a little.
>If you had these separately to the Theranos etc shares, you had to buy them. Since the $175M was a full loss of $175M then that can't account for the (non-losing) Uber shares.
Yep. So you had to have more than $175M of fully taxed money at the beginning. But most of that stayed in Uber, only a small percent of the Uber stock needed to be sold. This makes my original argument stronger, but only slightly. Since it only made my argument slightly stronger I didn't bother mentioning it.
>You'd need to know to only invest in Uber, and not in Theranos etc to do this. The idea of the portfolio is you need to invest broadly to allow for the successes. If you kept the $175M in your bank account, you wouldn't be able to achieve that.
Sure. But my main point is that this isn't a method to spend money while delaying tax on it. m_ke seemed to be saying a billionaire can spend money on a mansion without paying tax on it right away, but that $175M at the beginning already had tax paid on it. So the $175M spent on the mansion was fully taxed already.
A diversified portfolio helps with optimizing stock sales to delay some taxes. But enough taxes are still paid early such that every dollar spent is fully taxed by the time it's spent.
>If you had these separately to the Theranos etc shares, you had to buy them. Since the $175M was a full loss of $175M then that can't account for the (non-losing) Uber shares.
Yep. So you had to have more than $175M of fully taxed money at the beginning. But most of that stayed in Uber, only a small percent of the Uber stock needed to be sold. This makes my original argument stronger, but only slightly. Since it only made my argument slightly stronger I didn't bother mentioning it.
>You'd need to know to only invest in Uber, and not in Theranos etc to do this. The idea of the portfolio is you need to invest broadly to allow for the successes. If you kept the $175M in your bank account, you wouldn't be able to achieve that.
Sure. But my main point is that this isn't a method to spend money while delaying tax on it. m_ke seemed to be saying a billionaire can spend money on a mansion without paying tax on it right away, but that $175M at the beginning already had tax paid on it. So the $175M spent on the mansion was fully taxed already.
A diversified portfolio helps with optimizing stock sales to delay some taxes. But enough taxes are still paid early such that every dollar spent is fully taxed by the time it's spent.