Lord of the Roths: How Tech Mogul Peter Thiel Turned a Retirement Account for the Middle Class Into a $5 Billion Tax-Free Piggy Bank
Over the last 20 years, Thiel has quietly turned his Roth IRA – a humdrum retirement vehicle intended to spur Americans to save for their golden years – into a gargantuan tax-exempt piggy bank, confidential Internal Revenue Service data shows. Using stock deals unavailable to most people, Thiel has taken a retirement account worth less than $2,000 in 1999 and spun it into a $5 billion windfall.
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What’s more, as long as Thiel waits to withdraw his money until April 2027, when he is six months shy of his 60th birthday, he will never have to pay a penny of tax on those billions.
I read this a while ago and it is still blowing my mind. It’s an amazing strategy but is absurd and abusive to allow billions of taxes to be avoided like this.
This sort of abuse seems simple to stop with a law limiting how much money can be taken out of a Roth IRA per year. Make it an absurdly high number (in the millions) and it would affect no one but abusers, like Mr. Thiel. Let’s make this happen before April 2027.