As a founder you can grant yourself options or shares at essentially infinitesimally small values in the very early days of the company and pay virtually no tax.
1. Form a C Corp
2. Grant founders shares at $0.000x/share
3. Early exercise all of said shares at basically nothing
4. Make 83(b) election to IRS
5. Take advantage of long term cap gains and qsbs
I’m sure plenty of folks in this forum have done similar things, the only difference is mr. thiel put it into his Roth account, essentially betting on himself and it paid off big time.
Everyone in the private company I work for has EMI options that trigger on change of control.