Utterly astounded and dismayed to see this much of HN's audience completely fail to comprehend what they've read here and paint this as some sort of sinister theft.

This is the law functioning as intended. Thiel's case is a one-in-100-million+ event. He may have the only Roth IRA in existence that's valued at over $5 billion. But he didn't do it by exploiting some sort of "loophole" or paying high-priced accountants to shield his assets in foreign entities offshore. He put his investments in a Roth IRA just like any of you can do. The only difference is his investments were in the top 0.0001% in terms of performance. That's generally how people get to be billionaires.

And that's not even to mention that the assets in a Roth IRA are essentially worthless to him - he's not old enough to make withdrawals or take distributions tax-free and you can't borrow against a Roth IRA. The funds are essentially unavailable to him for years to come unless he wants to pay taxes and penalties.

Again - this isn't a tax dodge. This is someone who used the law exactly as intended without any illegal or shady dealings and happened to be incredibly fortunate.

The whole article is a hit piece designed to get whip people into a furor. And lately I've been noticing propublica publishing a lot of those.