Lord of the Roths: How Tech Mogul Peter Thiel Turned a Retirement Account into $5 Billion Tax-Free

[Nevilledog]

Link to tweet

https://www.propublica.org/article/lord-of-the-roths-how-tech-mogul-peter-thiel-turned-a-retirement-account-for-the-middle-class-into-a-5-billion-dollar-tax-free-piggy-bank


Billionaire Peter Thiel, a founder of PayPal, has publicly condemned “confiscatory taxes.” He’s been a major funder of one of the most prominent anti-tax political action committees in the country. And he’s bankrolled a group that promotes building floating nations that would impose no compulsory income taxes.

But Thiel doesn’t need a man-made island to avoid paying taxes. He has something just as effective: a Roth individual retirement account.

Over the last 20 years, Thiel has quietly turned his Roth IRA — a humdrum retirement vehicle intended to spur Americans to save for their golden years — into a gargantuan tax-exempt piggy bank, confidential Internal Revenue Service data shows. Using stock deals unavailable to most people, Thiel has taken a retirement account worth less than $2,000 in 1999 and spun it into a $5 billion windfall.

To put that into perspective, here’s how much the average Roth was worth at the end of 2018: $39,108.

And here’s how much $5 billion is: If every one of the 2.3 million people in Houston, Texas, were to deposit $2,000 into a bank today, those accounts still wouldn’t equal what Thiel has in his Roth IRA.

*snip*

[awesomerwb1]

1. CAn someone elaborate on this part:

"Using stock deals unavailable to most people,". What could these stock deals be and why aren't they available to most people?

Thank you

[Probatim]

2. In some cases, the very wealthy utilize the services of companies that

specialize in trading algorithms.

All of these funds rely on algorithms designed by math geniuses. One such fund is Renaissance Tech's Medallion Fund. Per Wiki, and I've seen this in articles, the fund has a historic return of 66% over the last 30 years. It's an employee-only fund and fees drop the return down to 39% over the same period.

You need a boatload of money to play with and you'll cough up a fairly large chunk of money to stay in these funds.

[Budi]

3. Check STRIPE credit card processing, the coders who wrote it & Cambridge Analytica, team tRump, Data

Thiel & the coders who wrote STRIPE (Saikat Chakrabarti ), Cambridge Analytica, team tRump, Data Collection etc...the lead up to the 2016 election was prob where he made a chunk of change.
Voter Data was key to 2016 mass media messaging, & a hot commodity to be collected & sold on the political market.

Thiel headed off to claim residency/citizenship in New Zeland shortly after the 2016 election was handed to tRump.
Not sure on whether his big 2016 money haul could have been moved off-shore, but if his sudden NZ citizenship offered a safe haven off-shore depository, Pete Thiel would have jumped on that deal.

Thiel is a Silicon Valley corrupt hack that should have been investigated long ago.