Pask

Ro Khanna’s solution to taxing illiquid billionaire founders is so stupid it sounds like satire. Say you founded a private company valued at $5 billion. You do not have $5 billion (surprise). You own shares that might eventually be worth $20 billion, $500 million or zero. Government says congrats, pay up. You say, “Cool, except I don’t have the cash.” Ro’s fix? Pledge the shares to the government and borrow the money to pay the government. This idea is absolutely bonkers. The government decides what your private company is worth, taxes you based on its estimate, lends you money against it, and then takes the money back as taxes. You now have debt against the government for imaginary taxes and if you don't pay you forfeit and the own a share of your company. The government is now an appraiser, bank, creditor, tax collector and shareholder. Maybe we can fund more Learing Centers (I digress). AND...it gets even dumber. Under current federal tax rules, absent some special exemption, handing over collateral to satisfy nonrecourse debt is generally treated as a sale, which means another tax. So California lends you $250M against startup shares so you can pay California its wealth tax. Ten years later the company is toast. You can lose your company, lose your shares and still owe taxes on money you never had. And who exactly is valuing all of this? Professional investors struggle to value private companies when they have data rooms, preferred terms, board access and actual money on the line. Now government is supposed to put an annual mark on founder common and tax it? A $10B preferred financing round does not mean founder common can actually be sold at that valuation. Different share classes exist. Liquidation preferences exist. Dilution exists. Secondary discounts exist. Sometimes there isn’t a buyer at any remotely comparable price. So how do you solve this @RoKhanna? We already know how wrong these marks can be. Roughly 67% of unicorns that IPO’d in 2025 priced below their last private valuation. Yet somehow government is going to know the “correct” value every year. You take the risk. You quit the job. You work for years. You take dilution. Most startups fail and your shares go to zero. Government doesn’t share that downside. Then policymakers look backward at Bezos, Zuckerberg, Musk and Jensen, the handful of guys who actually won, and use them to rewrite the economics for every kid deciding whether to take the same swing. Heads, the company dies and government says “no crying in the casino.” Tails, you actually win and suddenly you’re an evil tech billionaire who owes government 5% of the paper mark every year. GGs. Ro has to defend the moronic economics. Bernie’s job is to make sure you’re too angry to examine them. “Fair share.” “Billionaire class.” “The rich.” Instead of asking whether taxing unrealized ownership makes sense, Bernie changes the question to whether billionaires have too much money. Don’t discuss liquidity. Show the mansion. Don’t discuss valuation or incentives. Show the yacht. That is class warfare. And it matters before the company even exists. Nobody knew Bezos would become Bezos when he started Amazon. Nobody knew Facebook would become Meta. Nobody knew Nvidia would become the most important chip company in the world. Policy written around the winners changes the economics for the next generation of potential founders. You aren’t only taxing Zuckerberg after Facebook worked. You’re changing the math for the 24 yr old kid deciding whether to spend the next decade trying to build the next one. America works partly because ambitious people from all over the world come here believing the upside is worth the risk. Leave the comfortable job. Start something. Raise money. Fail. Try again. And if it finally works, own a meaningful piece of what you created. If the new deal becomes “you eat all the downside, but if your paper equity gets big enough we start taking 5% every year,” don’t act shocked when some people stop taking the risk or take it somewhere else. Bernie and Ro love showing you the lifestyle and telling you what they deem “excessive” wealth. What they rarely show is everything sitting underneath it. Take Bezos. Show his net worth going up $20B and ask why one guy needs all that money. Alright champ, let’s zoom out. Amazon employs more than 1 million people in the United States. Independent sellers using Amazon support more than 2 million U.S. jobs and paid more than $100B in wages in 2024. So before you even get to Bezos’ personal tax return, millions of people are earning money because this company exists. Those wages generate income taxes and payroll taxes. Amazon’s sales generate sales-tax revenue. Amazon itself pays corporate income taxes, employer payroll taxes and state and local taxes. In 2025 Amazon reported roughly $12.4B of federal income-tax expense, $7.9B of federal employer payroll and other taxes and fees, and $7.5B of state and local taxes. Then there’s another $24.8B collected and remitted on behalf of employees and $33.4B in sales taxes. Roughly $86B moved through those reported tax categories in one year. Did Amazon itself economically bear all $86B? Obviously not. Customers pay sales tax. Employees pay their withholding. That's how this all works. The company created the jobs, wages and transactions that created the tax base. Bernie wants you staring at Bezos’ personal tax return as though none of that exists. The million-plus employees, sellers, suppliers, truck drivers, warehouses, contractors, construction crews, software companies and retirement accounts all disappear. And quick reminder: Bezos getting $10B richer because Amazon had a good day in the market does not mean $10B landed in his bank account. The market repriced stock he already owned. When he actually sells appreciated shares, that generally creates a capital-gains tax bill. Jensen Huang got insanely rich because Nvidia became insanely valuable. Nvidia also employs roughly 42,000 people, around 31,000 in R&D, and paid more than $20 BILLION in cash income taxes in its latest fiscal year. Nearly $17B went to the federal government alone. It also reported roughly $7.9B in taxes tied to employee stock plans. So Jensen got richer. Shareholders got richer. Employees got richer. Government collected billions. All four things can be true at once. Meta spent more than $72B on capex in 2025. That money went into chips, data centers, power, construction, engineers and contractors. Not Zuckerberg’s checking account. A lot of people make money when successful companies make money. That story just sucks for class warfare. It is much easier to show the billionaire’s net worth and pretend his gain was everyone else’s loss. And federally Sanders and Khanna want to do this every year. A 5% annual tax on wealth. So forget the valuation mess for a second and just run the math. Your assets make 8% and government takes 5% of the asset value? That 5% tax just ate 62.5% of your 8% gross return, before income or capital-gains taxes. Make 5%? Your entire nominal return is gone. Make 3%? You’re selling principal to pay the tax. Obviously people react to that. Investors demand more return, founders rethink where they live and capital goes looking for better economics. Which is a bizarre experiment to run when America is already winning on startups and innovation. The U.S. has roughly 950 private unicorns and produced more than half of the world’s new unicorns in the first half of 2026. California attracted roughly $191B of venture investment in 2025, ~60% of the U.S. total. Other countries spend decades trying to manufacture this ecosystem. Startup visas, tax incentives, special programs, anything to attract founders and capital. We already have it. Maybe don’t fuck it up. Bernie calls it “fairness.” Fine. Define fair @BernieSanders The top 1% earned roughly 21% of U.S. adjusted gross income in 2023 and paid roughly 38% of federal individual income taxes, about $823B. Washington spends $6.28T, annually, and already has a $1.8T deficit through July. I don't think you need more money. Before inventing another tax base, maybe explain where the money already goes and what outcomes we're getting for it. California spent nearly $24B on homelessness and nothing got better. Billions lost to medicare fraud. There is reported $200-400B of what we know lost to it each year. Not sure giving the government more money, especially California is a good idea. But taking another dollar out of productive private capital does not magically make that dollar better allocated. Other developed countries have already wrestled with this too. The number of OECD countries with individual net wealth taxes fell from 12 in 1990 to 4 by 2017. Maybe they all got captured by billionaires. Or maybe they learned something. Valuing private assets is messy. Liquidity matters. Capital moves. People move. Incentives matter. Tax income. Tax realized gains. Close actual loopholes. Audit the stuff you already spend. America became the world’s innovation engine because people came here, took huge risks, raised capital, built companies and owned the upside when it worked. You want more people making that bet. Not fewer. Be very careful messing with that machine, especially when the people asking for more of the capital are already almost $40T in debt. “He can afford it” is not economics. “Fair share” means nothing until you define it. And envy is a terrible tax policy.