that there’s a bigger problem than untaxed wealth. That problem is the trillions of dollars that don’t show up ontax return or financial statement, the “hidden” wealth of world’s wealthiest people. Helping those people hiding their fortunes is an army of lawyers, consultants, accountants, and more who get paid millions to help their clients hide trillions.
Yes. A lot of the hidden wealth activity takes place in the 2nd and 3rd generations. So someone like Bezos, we know that most of his wealth is in Amazon stock. Those numbers that ProPublica uses come from Forbes. Forbes is kind of tracking, say, Jeff Bezos’ ownership over the last 20 years, really. So it’s probably harder for him to make a couple billion disappear.
I estimated that there’s about 90,000 people who work with those ultra-high net worth individuals on the individual level. And then there’s probably another 200,000 people who work with the 1,000 or so global companies, both inside and outside those companies, in the accounting departments and the legal departments and the tax planning.
Even onshore, they will use anonymous, limited liability companies incorporated in Delaware. And often what they’ll do is just use a bunch of these devices and kind of layer things to create both confidentiality and to kind of bulletproof the system.
So what happened after 2010, 2011 is a lot of hedge funds revamped themselves to call themselves family offices. They became family offices. At the same time, a lot of family offices that were mostly thinking of multigenerational preservation got excited about the more high-risk, adventurous end of finance. Both those trends meant that family offices started to do more high-risk investing.
Someone said to me years ago that millionaires and billionaires translate their financial capital into political capital. How do they game the political system or the regulatory system in their favor? Part of what makes this industry what it is is its secrecy and keeping a low profile. You did talk to a couple of people, though, at least one of which with a pseudonym. You call him C. Dalton Thompson, which strikes the right sort of aristocratic note there.
Lesson's from Tony Robbin's and Warren Buffet teach us that philanthropy is inherit in wealth, yet it doesn't come without stipulation. Thereby, it is logical as a chidrens story to think one can hide wealth that can be earned outside of infrastructure, yet isn't really a gift.
So put a million dollar levy on each accountant and lawyer they hire.