this post was submitted on 28 Jan 2026
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His tax rate isn't related to his net worth, though. He didn't get a check for $59b.
You don't pay taxes on unrealized gains from investment vehicles, which is a good thing for the average person. Imagine having to pay a (mostly) perpetually increasing income tax on your 401k every year.
What needs to happen is the loans that banks give them against their non-liquid assets should be taxed as income.
That's the problem.
That's why a nuanced, well thought out tax plan is necessary. The average person doesn't have extra money to pay even more taxes. Billionaires do. That's the fundamental difference
Nah, let’s tax them as realized gains, because if you are using your unrealized gains as collateral, is that not a form of realizing their value?
I don’t care TBH, whichever one costs them more.
That's basically the same as taxing the loans as income, but I'm down to double tax them.
I don't think so. Just trigger a tax event on anything used as collateral for a loan.
That doesn’t work. Houses are already taxed to hell, even unrealized gains on a house is taxed. So triple taxing when you use a house as collateral would hurt small business owners.
But it's not extra taxing, it's just triggering a tax event so realized gain is taxed at that moment instead of some time in the future, which for the billionaires is never.
It is triple tax. You pay tax when you buy the house, you pay yearly tax of the unrealized gain of the increase in your property value. On top of that you want to add a tax when you use property as collateral so in this case a house which small business owners frequently do.
Everyone needs to pay their fair share of taxes. Get rid of deductions for corporations and people with revenue/earnings over a certain amount, say 500k. We need to stop complicating the tax code because that is why there are so many loopholes.
I'm in Canada, maybe it's different. You pay sales tax on a new house when you buy it, just like any purchase. Theres also land transfer taxes an other fees. When it goes up in value and you sell, you pay capital gains (unless it's your principal residence, and then there's an exemption). But until you sell or some other tax event, you don't pay any tax on its increased value until such a tax event happened. At that point it's assessed and you owe any tax on the gain. So if a tax event triggers some tax owing (like if using it as collateral triggered this), then later when you sell, you wouldn't pay on that gain again, only on any gain since the last tax event.
The value of the collateral would equal the value of the loan, though. It's effectively the same thing.
But the big difference is that one of those is taxable, and the other is a bullshit way the rich avoid paying into the society that let them get to that point.
We're talking about changes to the tax code.
There is certainly some careful wording there that more intelligent people than us need to be writing. Both of you make sense, but I’m sure there would be ways to weasel out of one or the other. Something like “this or that, whichever is greater” would be a good start.
It would be fairly trivial to word it properly. The fact that loopholes exist is a feature, not a bug.
Exactly the point. If the collateral is the same value as the loan, then the increase in value of the collateral is realized. Unless of course they're valuing the collateral at the original value, when first obtained.
If only there was a way to make sure the tax isn't levied on normal people... Oh well.
The problem with taxing unrealized gains is that the value is always changing. It's not real money.
You'd have to pick a point in time to capture the stock/asset value, and the wealthy would just tank the value right before.
How about the moment they use it as collateral for personal loans they use as income?
You mean like the bank does when they loan the money? The loan shouldn't be able to be disbursed without realized gains/capital behind it, and they can't tank the value without impacting their loan.
Portfolio loans need to be taxed. Absolutely. You can pay 1% interest on a loan vs ~30% on income taxes. Something will need to be done about shell corporations holding personal assets as well. His yacht isn’t in his name.
Tax their net worth. The tax should be progressive, so that beyond a certain value, they can't get any richer even if their investment give high yields. Starting bracket can be 50M, 100M$, at this scale it doesn't matter much.
The problem is to do that you'll have to capture the value of all of their assets at a specific point in time. This would require them knowing about it, so they could tank the value before.
But, when they put it up for collateral, they're saying the assets are worth the amount of the loan, so it should be treated as a realized gain.
We absolutely pay taxes on unrealized gains. Property tax is the tax of unrealized gains. We do it for houses why can’t we do it for stocks? He’s getting dividend checks worth moillions every quarter.
The rich don't pay taxes on unrealized gains. The poor do. You haven't realized any gains on your house by owning it, but the taxes go up every single time it is re-assessed in value.
Just tax wealth at twice the rate of inflation above 500 million dollars.
Above 2 million, maybe. Hell, make it 10 million for fun but holy shit do not let someone with 400 million pretend they aren’t disgustingly rich parasites.
The difference between someone worth 100 million and someone worth 100 billion is about 100 billion. But yeah finding a good point to set a limit is hard.
It might be hard but I think buddy coulda done better than half a billion. We seriously need to stop low-balling our own shit, and hell we need to stop with the “offers” as if we can’t just make laws. It’s insane that we’re like this.
I suggest some other things need to happen to him.
That's just treating the symptoms, not the cause. All of those assets would go to someone who would still not be paying taxes on them.
Didn't say we had to stop at him.
You don't pay taxes on unrealized gains
When you use it as collateral it's a realized gain and should be taxed the value of the collateral.
But loans aren't income. You have to pay them back.
Taxing a loan just because the 'wrong thing' was used as collateral is nonsensically-arbitrary, I think.
P.S. Home equity loans are also 'loans against non-liquid assets'.
Cmon, we can describe this process to discuss why it’s wrong, we can’t codify it into law that if you borrow against unrealized gains for the purpose of providing yourself a liquid income, you’re realizing the gains and must pay a tax on it?
People don’t take out home equity loans to spend on groceries, maids, or yachts. They spend it on improving or repairing their home. The purpose is the asset.
But that’s just the thing - they’re not borrowing against their shares to improve the company. They’re using that as their income, and when the loans come due they just take out another one to pay off the first one. Infinite money glitch.
Fair enough, but if you want to start taxing the ultra wealthy, you have to start somewhere. Those loans are their main source of income.
Loans aren't income. They only reason this 'move' works at all is because they are creating value at a rate that exceeds the interest rate + inflation. Other than the scale of the 'tactic', it's no different from taking a home equity loan to improve your home so that the amount it sells for has increased by more than was lost from the interest on the loan.
Realize that the lenders giving these ultra-wealthy these loans are not in the business of throwing their money out the window for fun. They make these loans only because they get repaid, with enough interest to make being without those funds in the meantime, worth it for them.
Then the stocks used as collateral should be taxed as realized gains.
Since we're talking about changes to the tax code, we could make it so that it only applies to loans over some arbitrary amount, say 10x the median yearly income of the bottom 50% of earners (within a certain time period to counter multiple smaller loans as loopholes).
Why? They haven't been realized. Literally nothing happens to collateral unless the loan is defaulted on. Do you think you should your house should be treated as realized gains (i.e. the same as if you sold it), if you take out a home equity loan?
This is literally impossible to realistically enforce, total waste of resources and effort to even try. Myriad ways to spread it out over different people/entities/etc.
Why not make a law against using unrealized capital gains as loan collateral? Or just force 'realization' of the capital at loan time, and they can pay the taxes on that. A home equity loan is against real property, so it wouldn't be subject to the same issue.
Because that would outlaw home equity loans, for one thing. Anything you own that's increased in value since you started owning it is "unrealized capital gains" by definition, until/unless you sell it, not just stocks.
The fact is, taking a loan out using stuff you own as collateral, regardless of what it is, is a perfectly normal thing to do that in itself deprives no one of anything. Lenders aren't in the business of throwing money out the window—they make these loans because they get repaid, and then some. Someone who takes out a home equity loan and uses the money to renovate their house so that it'll sell for an increased price beyond the loan amount + the interest rate, is making the exact same 'move' as someone who takes a loan out using their stock in a company as collateral, and uses that money to do things that make that stock increase in value beyond the loan amount + the interest rate.
Not the previous poster, but you're of correct of course. The issue is that when multi-billionaires can get loans at nearly 0% because if their ridiculous "unrealized" wealth and then claim "nope, no income here" despite their "unrealized" wealth increasing significantly, there is clearly a big problem and needs a solutions.
I am sure there could be some nuance used in any restrictions against said loans or tax against said weath. Someone before used a "$50 million" value as a good starting point, and at first glance that seems reasonable. Hell, you could easily make that number ten times higher and still cover most of the worst offenders. As long as there is an upper ceiling that stops these wanna be wealth hoarding dragons it's a good start.