Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by bayarearefugee 33 days ago
> works for no salary

Working for no salary is almost never charitable and is almost always just part of a larger tax avoidance scheme.

2 comments

Yeah I've never thought that that was the win that people seem to think it is. When you're that high up in the company, you have so much stock that you can pretty easily get loans against for however much you need, and write off the interest in the process.
What U.S. tax code provision allows an individual to write off (non-primary-mortgage) loan interest?
Can't you write off capital losses? I've been able to deduct margin interest from my capital gains.
Margin interest is tax-deductible, but only when you're using the loan to buy more securities. So, in context, a CEO who "works for no salary" and just takes out loans secured by their stock holdings to fund their lifestyle does not get to write off that interest.

Not to say the "no salary" thing isn't silly anyway, of course.

They have to trot it out because otherwise there's not much else to pimp about Cohen as CEO and this attempted deal seems much more oriented to juice the total market value of GME to more easily meet the criteria for his recent pay package rather than a great idea for either company on it's own.
Doesn't matter as long as incentives are aligned. As a major stockholder and active advocate, he is already vested in success.
I'm not sure that the incentives actually are aligned. It seems like the incentives are to think short term and do sketchy shit to pump the stock.
>It seems like the incentives are to think short term and do sketchy shit to pump the stock.

Its a meme stock, that's what stockholders actually want.

I'm arguing it's not "success". I don't believe that a meme stock is a truly long-term business.
>I'm arguing it's not "success". I don't believe that a meme stock is a truly long-term business.

Duh. Crypto is the peak meme investment. Literally worthless, yet the market size is in trillions now, with even pension funds buying into it.

It doesn't follow any fundamentals, but as the meme markets defacto exist, there needs to be some models of valuing these investments other than fundamentals.

Sure, and I think that these things will, eventually, crash. I suspect GameStop will before Bitcoin, but I think both will eventually.

The market can stay irrational for a very long time.