I buy risky stocks. They go up. I am lucky I pay tax on the profit. All good
To me this smacks of using taxpayer money to subsidise founders in incentivising their employees. Yes it's a risky investment. If it's you and co-founders, go for your life. The minute it's an "employee" either give them more stock to compensate for the tax to come or pay them so the lower equity does not matter.
At some point stop shooting for the moon and start being part of society.
if society is so shit we need millions to get out of it, there's your problem
I don’t entirely disagree with you, but I would argue the change should come from the government directly with the tax code, not the companies themselves.
The tax code is an arbitrary set of constraints to an optimization problem that startups are solving to maximize the value of the money (and its runway) that has been invested into them. And with such a high startup failure rate in general, I can’t blame them for using the available levers to make that funding go as far as possible, even if that results in strange ways of incentivizing employees.
This is exactly what this is. When I buy stock, I’m passively contributing to society. Founders actively create value. This isn’t my hill to die on. But I see the value in incentivising risk-taking.
But there surely are many ways to incentivise founding of companies (we want) that do not look suspiciously like tax handouts to rich people.
I get the idea no-one has managed to reproduce silicon valley. But that started life as decades long military investment in future tech. it's hard to argue that motivated governments could not repeat for green tech, bio tech etc.
> The minute it's an "employee" either give them more stock to compensate for the tax to come or pay them so the lower equity does not matter.
Okay but in practice you can't rely on the employer/founders paying the tax for the employees, and because money is fungible, a tax on the employee is equivalent to a tax on the employers. Even if you pass a law so that all the burden is on the employer, because of the previous point it will still be the employee paying.
I buy risky stocks. They go up. I am lucky I pay tax on the profit. All good
To me this smacks of using taxpayer money to subsidise founders in incentivising their employees. Yes it's a risky investment. If it's you and co-founders, go for your life. The minute it's an "employee" either give them more stock to compensate for the tax to come or pay them so the lower equity does not matter.
At some point stop shooting for the moon and start being part of society.
if society is so shit we need millions to get out of it, there's your problem