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Comment by CalChris | Hacker News Reader

I implicitly understood Buy, Borrow when CEOs making a $1/yr became a thing. That seemingly hairshirt salary is publicly reported. I didn't foresee the Die part because it is affected in private.

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This actually has more to do with the vast majority of CEO compensation being structured as stock option grants, and very little if anything to do with “Buy, Borrow, Die.” It’s largely meant to communicate skin in the game to shareholders (“I don’t make any money unless I drive shareholder value via stock price increases").

Whether or not that’s actually true is a totally different matter and depends largely on the actually structure of the compensation, but that’s the theory.

The point of Buy is to acquire the asset you will Borrow against. How doesn't really matter. So Larry did that by growing a company. Good for Larry. But the tax avoidance is the same from there. Borrow, Die.

Sure. But you can do that more effectively by also being paid a salary (which you can then use to buy more stuff!).

CEOs making $1/year is more due to Clinton's 1993 law against deducting CEO pay above $1,000,000 from taxable corporate income. Before that CEOs were happy to be paid normal salaries and pay normal tax on them.

That $1M cap rose year by year. According to ProPublica, it was $8.2M in 2014.

https://www.propublica.org/article/the-executive-pay-cap-tha...

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