[gumby]

I have myself had a multimillion dollar divorce.

Dividing your stock portfolio isn’t taxable as you aren’t selling anything. Also you can divide up the houses and then if one party’s assessed value is more than trivially different from the other’s, you can make up the difference in the division of the financial assets.

Most people of course have perhaps one house and many do sell it to split the asset value, but as I said in my comment we are talking about the billionaires (in Schmidt’s case) and multimillionaires where there are many more degrees of freedom.