Comment by machinebun | Hacker News Reader

Comment by machinebun | Hacker News Reader

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What happened was Thiel buying 1.7M shares of stock in his own startup at a value of $0.001 per share in 1999 in his Roth IRA (and then cashing out for $30M+ in 2002). It's debatable whether it was legal (because he was an officer/director of the company and that law is on the books), but the better question would be - should it have been illegal, and the answer to that, in my opinion, is a resounding yes.

I believe non-public investments should be banned from Roth IRAs (and that we should close all of the backdoor loopholes to them as well). They were meant for a certain group of people at the outset and were then twisted around in knots to provide more tax-breaks for the well-off (which should be rolled back). I think mega backdoor Roth should not be a thing, rollover Roth IRA should not be a thing - bring Roth back to it's original vision.

The IRS apparently agreed with you. The article sloppily doens't doesn't give a year, but:

> The IRS, meanwhile, was floundering in its efforts to police retirement accounts. At one point the agency recommended Congress prohibit IRA accounts from buying investments that aren’t traded on a public market, such as founders’ shares. That went nowhere, too. Instead, Congress began slashing the IRS’ budget, kneecapping the agency for more than a decade.

>It's debatable whether it was legal (because he was an officer/director of the company and that law is on the books)

I am interested in finding out the answer to this, as others have posted in this thread the text of the law which makes it seem like he should not have been able to, and what reasoning could possibly have made it legal.

You won't find the answer, because you're innocent until proven guilty. The laws are not formally defined, it would need to go in front of courts, and then people could argue whatever interpretation and evidence they want to convince one way or another.

I think what's more clear is that it's clever and probably an unintended loophole, be it technically legal or not isn't so important. What matters in the end is a bunch of money didn't go to maintaining society's infrastructure, paying for military, and all that, instead money from other sources and other people's pockets was used. Do you care? Do we care? I think that's the more relevant dimension to think about and discuss.

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