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Comment by datadrivenangel | Hacker News Reader

Can't make money in your non-profit? Just self-deal and have another business that you can make money on!

Often illegal to do this too egregiously.

It's the oldest trick in the book.

The nonprofit doesn't pay taxes. Nonprofit buys it's supplies from a for-profit. You mark up the supplies and buy them from the for-profit.

Organize costs so that the for-profit incurs all the costs and the non-profit gets most of the revenue.

What exactly would that accomplish? The For Profit would have to pay a ton of taxes on all that revenue if the non-profit incurred all the costs!

Could the for-profit be located in a different jurisdiction where there's no company tax (or something along similar lines)?

a)That's not the case for openAI

b)If you do that, why have the not-for-profit incurring costs? Just put it all where there's no company tax.

Net revenue minus taxes is profit.

This is almost certainly a form of securities fraud, however.

That only matters if the government has the ability to prosecute it successfully, but I would posit that most fraud does not even get investigated.

This is how IKEA has been operating forever.

https://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/012216/how-i....

Perhaps, but let’s not assume that what a wealthy Nazi sympathizer bribed his way into doing in postwar Europe is a repeatably legal arrangement.

That would strictly result in paying more tax than if you just had the for profit and put all the costs and revenues in there.

Hasn't stopped anyone before.

I'm still waiting for Elon to get reamed over SolarCity. Oh wait, he never will, and will strong arm the company into giving him another 12% of TSLA.

SolarCity? Tsla saved them when he rolled them into Tesla. Anyone who picked up TSLA shares from that purchase did significantly better than they ever would have as solarcity.

He might be talking about the subsidy deal with NYS that imploded.

If the board allows it, why should the public care? Aren't self imploding companies good for the economy? It allows newer ones to fulfill their place.

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