On a moral level I think it's fair to give them a tax break on this, since they're effectively donating all future company profits to global society through the foundations.
.....except since they're not selling the company, they're also likewise not earning a net 2.3bln in income. Hence: ridiculous.
It's one of the most absurd articles to ever come out of Bloomberg, and in fact it's so bad that I'd instead rather see meaningful dialog about people with the means exerting long lasting influence beyond death. The tax argument presented here is entirely contrived.
I'd likewise prefer seeing a debate around whether a 501c4 is enough to achieve the stated goals around influencing climate change policy and whether the option of political contributions is worthwhile compared to a 501c3, for instance. Any discussion stemming from the current "skirts $700m in taxes" headline is bunk.
We take his word that it will be used for Climate Change.
If he takes $1MM to donate to Harvard to secure a seat for each his children/grandchildren, then that's legal. If he uses it to host parties for the wealthy to "raise awareness", then that's legal. If he uses it to setup hotels, flights, IT servers, consultants, etc, then that's all legal. If he runs for office and uses the money for his campaign, that's all legal.
Moreover, if he gets into office he can now accept donations to his foundation in order to influence policy/laws without much question.
...and for a myriad of other quasi-personal uses, it's basically untraceable as non-profits have low financial reporting requirements.
I am very skeptical of these personally owned family "Foundations".
> but look… he could’ve done bad thing
We have every reason to believe Yvon and co. will be handling this responsibly and no reason to believe they will not be.
This would definitely not be legal.
https://www.irs.gov/charities-non-profits/other-non-profits/...