free-content ad network?
content-free ad network
FTFY
Marc Andreessen - a Facebook insider who serves on the company's board - held true to his promise on Monday by selling stock worth $54.1m in the recently floated free-content ad network to pay off tax obligations. To do that, the Netscape founder needed to offload roughly 2.3 million Facebook shares. Andreessen had agreed in …
You can bet they've already looked at it and found the tax levy to be watertight, especially if it's applicable at the point of liquidation of those assets, and those assests can be proven to have - and gained in - personal value.
They'll pay, but will now be looking at every trick in the book to punt their remaining assests offshore before they need to liquidate them into cash.
Well done to him for actually paying some tax. However, I can't help but think that when one man's tax bill is about three thousand times more than the global average income, something is wrong with the world.
[A quick google came up with a few sources from early this year citing the global average salary at about $18,000. ]
The ones I feel sorry for are those who get caught in tax traps - I seem to remember some poor sods in the UK who received a "bonus" of shares, which then tanked - leaving them with a tax bill which actually exceeded the value of the shares they'd received! Painful. (I think the idea was for it to be a perk: get given shares at £10, sell later at £20, but only pay the income tax on the £10 you were given them at ... fine until they crash to £1 but still cost you £2+ each in tax...)