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Comment by sxp | Hacker News Reader

One famous person who did this was Larry Ellison using Oracle shares. This almost caused a problem for him in the 90s due to the stock dropping in value:

https://www.sfgate.com/news/article/Inside-look-at-a-billion...

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This is not an example of "buy, borrow, die." It is just borrowing against his shares. Everybody with a brokerage account does that.

There are no real problems for him mentioned in the article. He had loans of about 1 billion, increasing to 1.2 billion at the peak, but his shareholdings in Oracle were 10x of that.

His advisor did his job by warning that this could go wrong if Oracle stock dropped massively. But it never dropped that far, so he was fine.

The reddit post talks about putting "the asset" in a trust, but the article says Ellison personally owned shares of Oracle. That does not fit.

And most ultra-rich that own lots of shares of large publicly-traded corporations own them outright. So this seems suspicious I would say.

I mean I often see news about some CEO or other selling shares, and how this is announced in advance to not be insider trading. I have even seen sometimes the documents submitted to the SEC posted on the net. There are no trusts involved.

Larry was borrowing on margin which is a similar strategy.

Ok, so there is a famous instance of a billionaire trying this strategy and almost destroying his wealth.

I'm not sure many financial advisors for the super rich would be recommending this method based on this.

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