Honestly, Mark Cuban seems like kind of a cool guy, for a billionaire. I'm sure he's done nasty shit, it's basically inevitable that even the most morally and ethically conscious person would have to do something bad in order to become a billionaire; however he doesn't come off as being sociopathically greedy like Musk or Bezos.
He's the one Shark who is almost a decent person. IIRC, he's the one who ended the policy that people presenting on the show had to give up part of their company no matter if they had an accepted deal or not. He made the very good point that anyone halfway decent at business would be very hesitant to take that offer, and they were losing out on good possibilities because of it.
Still, fuck him. You can't be a billionaire without doing shady shit somewhere.
I really dislike how much he espouses hustle culture. Like, it's crazy to applaud children who are spending every free minute they have on a business idea as if that has no negative impacts on their childhood if they aren't failing school. Or that he won't buy in if the business owner has a day job because entrepreneurs should only be successful if they gamble all of their savings apparently.
And an often overlooked downside of all the tax loopholes is that asshole billionaires don't pay tax, so they have a competitive advantage against someone like Mark Cuban.
Basically, with billionaires we are evolving them to become nastier with each generation.
It's weird because why would billionaires even need to compete amongst eachother? You don't even need to get close to a billion to exist in what amounts to a personal, post-scarcity paradise.
I can basically prove with scratch paper and a pen that any average American consumer is a slaver, environmental terrorist, and imperialist. We’ve all done or supported or ignored bad shit, and actually the worst shit ever.
I mean, I kind of like the fact that he's flexing paying his taxes to other billionaires, signaling that he's better than them for doing so. It would be kind of nice if every billionaire started flexing on one another like this and started trying to one up one another to showcase "whose the better person" sort of thing. Pipe dream, I know, but a girl CAN dream after all.
It's a nice dream, but I prefer my dream of IRS agents blasting open a mansion door with C4 and arresting the billionaire who pays less tax than me. Oh and while civil asset forfeiture is a thing, they can do that too. Charge the mansion with a crime and turn it into affordable housing.
I think one of the ways we can get this to happen more often is by celebrating these wins. That's sorta a way to get good things to continue happening. It's someone making the correct moral choice. Let's support that while continuing to demonize the bullshit the other billionaires do.
That's because you haven't extracted 95 times that first.
I guarantee you - even if you haven't paid a single penny in tax your entire life, by virtue of not being a billionaire, you have contributed significantly more to society than this leech ever has or will.
It's scary how good a job the billionaires have done in convincing you (and many many others) it's somehow the other way around.
It's all stock assets, so he IS a billionaire, he just cant access those billions unless he liquidates his stock assets.
Ask Elon.
But don't bring up that Elon has the FCC on him for the billions of dollars he has gotten out of banks as loans on the collateral of his stock holdings, all the while everyone knowing that the second Elon starts selling his stock holdings, they plummet, and suddenly that collateral drops from billions of dollars to hundreds of thousands of dollars in value. Because that's how stocks work. But the rich need to have a way to make their worthless existences spend poor people's savings accounts.
It’s all stock assets, so he IS a billionaire, he just cant access those billions unless he liquidates his stock assets.
You didn't read the article did you, but even without reading it you'd know he'd have to have a huge amount of income for the year (not just stock appreciation) to have a $275 million tax bill.
'Cuban, who is also one of the stars on ABC's "Shark Tank," has an estimated net worth of $5.4 billion and says his tax bill is "almost all long term capital gains," which almost certainly triggered a federal long-term capital gains tax of 20%.'
Lets assume generously that 100% if that is long term cap gains taxes (which you only get taxed on the sale of assets). In 2023 he would have had to have sold $1.375 billion in stock he'd held for more than one year.
It’s all stock assets, so he IS a billionaire, he just cant access those billions unless he liquidates his stock assets.
Funny, I can't access the number on my bank account either unless I liquidate that. Sometimes it's soothing to know even billionaires don't actually have a Scrooge McDuck style money bin with actual cash in it to swim around in.
Not sure why you're being downvoted. Rich people's net worth is not how much cash they have in their bank account. When you have a lot of money there are countless ways to avoid being taxed on it. The reason is obvious: politicians are part of that rich class and they decide the rules.
Just tax loans collateralized by stock as income, and give a deduction on the interest when they pay back the loan.
That’s currently the biggest loophole the wealthy use. They use their stock portfolios as collateral for loans, which are untaxed. Then as their portfolio grows they take out more loans to cover the old one and fund their lifestyle, or they liquidate some of their assets at the much lower capital gains tax to pay it back.
Just tax collateralized loans as realized gains and be done with it.
Without a wealth tax, he could quit today, stop all the loan nonsense and just put it in conservative index funds, and his blood line would be set for generations, even if they bred like rabbits and split it 500 different ways.
Apparently his net worth is 5.4 billion, so this’d be something like 4% of what he’s worth?
We're talking income taxes here. You're not taxed on net worth. Income taxes are what you brought in (in cash) for that year. Since he said in the article is nearly all long term cap gains taxes that means he sold stock or assets totaling about $1.375 billion in 2023. As in, with the sale of those assets thats how he had a taxable income large enough to generate that tax bill. Note: long term cap gains taxes are at a 20% rate.
He sold a majority stake in the Mavs. That’ll be where most of the tax bill comes from. Wants to use the money for something else. Still working with the team operationally.
His networth is 5.4 billion. 20% of that is a bit over a billion.... So not really.
I think you divided 5.4 billion by $275 million. Saw that it came out to almost 20. That means it's about 5%. Easy mistake to make. I do it all the time.
according to forbes, his net worth is about 5.4 billion. 276 million is about 4% of his net worth paid in tax.
I just checked what I payed in taxes vs my net worth. I paid about 11% of my net worth(not income) in taxes this last year. Damn that sucks looking at the numbers lol. At least he's almost halfway towards getting there and happy to pay.
I'm curious what it looks like for others. I'm in my 30s for reference in high cost of living location.
Net worth, in the general sense anyway, doesn't get taxed. This is one of the ways billionaires can pay so little taxes. Outside of things like property tax, you don't pay tax on something like a house.
If we are talking straight net worth and not income, then I paid ~10% in federal taxes last year. But again that's not really a fair comparison as we aren't taxed on net worth but income.
The tax system is fucked and needs a serious overhaul.
Sorry I was originally responding to another comment, but I figured I'd make mine a main comment to the post. The missing context to my post, that I just added, is "According to forbes, his net worth is about 5.4 billion. 276 million is about 4% of his net worth paid in tax."
So adding to your point that the tax system is fucked, I'm paying a higher percentage of taxes than a billionaire, and I'm not even a millionaire.
"Obscenely rich proud for poor people to celebrate him for doing less than the bare minimum"
Other obscenely rich people doing less, doesn't make this shit uplifting nor worth praise, it still is literally less than the bare minimum. Fuck this noise.
Except as I said, this is less than bare minimum, it doesn't even come near "good" let alone "perfect", it's literally a PR stunt designed to make you think it's good, and all you're doing here is proving how well it works as the system keeps chugging along and this billionaire, like all the others, continues getting richer at our expense.
So to paraphrase - it's bootlicking that is the enemy of progress, and you're getting a nice mouthful there.
Not OP, but I think he (along with other billionaire's) got rich off of tax breaks and subsidies that were tax funded. No person can earn his kind of wealth on their own and without some sort of exploitation, usually of poor people. Paying ~4% is understandably less than bare minimum.
Elaboration by request: It's a tiny amount of money that only sounds like a lot to the 99%. Relative to his wealth, this post is a sad reminder of the dragon's-hoard of wealth he still has and the desolation caused by aquiring it. I want to eat this whole mother fucker and I'd settle for like half, but I am certainly not uplifted by a bite of pinky toe.
Edit: Okay, it's uplifting that he is saying this and encouraging good citizenship. It's a paltry amount and I won't be pleased by it.
No one asked you to be pleased about the entirety of the situation. Just look at an individual action by an individual person. It's a step in a direction that sucks marginally less than the one we're in. It's a slap in the face to the ones too ashamed or greedy to do ANYTHING positive.
Should he do more? Yeah. It's the same argument that I hold against Taylor Swift recently - She's doing good things, and that should be acknowledged, but she's still a billionaire, and you quite simply cannot get to that level without human rights exploitation.
Neither of these things washes the other away. We can accept them both, give praise where it's due, and also give criticism where it's due.
Yes I can see where comparing one's circumstances to him and we're just a bunch of broke MF, but the bigger picture is he's paying and not afraid of saying anything about that.