[reco]

The comments here miss the point. Sure you can’t cash out all your stock at once without serious effects.

There is no need to sell any stock though to access insane wealth. I racked up a bill on that site worth 5% of Elon’s value and went pretty wild. Elon could easily tap into that wealth tomorrow with a loan from a bank backed by collateral from his stock without selling a thing. So he maintains control of his companies, doesn’t pay taxes (as he sold nothing), and can literally buy anything he could ever imagine without having any serious effect on his net worth

[sparky_z]

People always say this, and I always ask "but then doesn't he have to pay back the loan?" and I never get a good answer.

[beisner]

Presumably the loan period is quite long, and someone has some amount of income, so monthly payments are tiny. You can keep refinancing indefinitely until you die, after which your descendants can do a one-time liquidation (paying no cap gains tax) to pay off the balance.

You never have to pay back the loan yourself. Just make small monthly payments and refinance until death. This is actually a pretty widely-exploited part of our tax system, for very high net worth people.

[mlindner]

What prevents you from taking a loan out on your shares, buying more shares, then taking a loan of the same amount out on the shares you just bought, and do it again, and repeat it forever?

[labcomputer]

> I racked up a bill on that site worth 5% of Elon’s value and went pretty wild.

Great! Now how do we pick which lucky 20 people get to spend the wealth?