[r7000]

Sincere question: what do you believe should happen when a company becomes successful?

You make excellent criticisms and I've had similar thoughts. But I never really understood what people want to do other than confiscate companies once they become successful. Not saying that is what you want to do - you specifically say not that.

You mention "let’s engineer a network of trust and monitoring and a culture of transparency". I'm not sure what that means.

[pbw]

In the post, I say private individuals can own assets in two ways, as individuals (up to a cap) or through a personal corporation (no cap).

So, if you start a company that becomes huge and your slice is worth $100 billion, or even $10 trillion, you can still own all of that via the personal corporation. And you can invest or spend all of it [almost] however you want.

The difference is that the personal corporation has oversight; I only specify there will be a "board" I don't have anything concrete beyond that.

But the idea is in extreme circumstances, the board can over-rule your money-related decisions. The intent is they will only step in if you are going nuts, but the devil is in the details of how exactly to do that. It might be impossible, but I'd rather see us at least try rather have brain-damaged trillionaires causing unchecked mayhem.

When I make this argument, people assume I want to tax or seize the billionaire's wealth, but no, I'm saying they can keep every penny. Although to be fair, if you did cleave apart people's finances like this, taxing the "personal corporation" higher than the individual portion would be tempting.

[r7000]

> the devil is in the details

Well yeah :)

Any ideas on how the board is chosen? Does the majority(only) owner / CEO of the p-corp do it?

[pbw]

The board can and should be friendly with the p-corp owner. Almost all the time they are going to be green light everything. They are really just a "sanity check" (literally).

Now you could say how do we "make sure" the board acts when the time comes? Stands up to the owner? Maybe we don't. We put the mechanism in place, and if the board fails to stop the owner, then it didn't work in that specific case. And the world will know that. But as long as it works "most" of the time maybe that's enough.

Also I forgot, apart from a board a big thing might be reporting. Your p-corp activities would have much more stringent reporting requirements compared to a private individual. You can do anything you want with your $300M in private funds, including get it as small bills and roll around in it, but the p-corp funds need to be much more closely monitored. That alone, even without a board, would be big.