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 - 2021-06-24

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 June 24, 2021, Justin Elliott, ProPublica

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Billionaire Peter Thiel, a founder of PayPal, has publicly condemned "confiscatory taxes." He's been a major funder of one of the most prominent anti-tax political action committees in the country. And he's bankrolled a group that promotes building floating nations that would impose no compulsory income taxes.

But Thiel doesn't need a man-made island to avoid paying taxes. He has something just as effective: a Roth individual retirement account.

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.

Wikipedia cite:

{{cite news | first = Justin | last = Elliott | title = 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 | url = https://www.propublica.org/article/lord-of-the-roths-how-tech-mogul-peter-thiel-turned-a-retirement-account-for-the-middle-class-into-a-5-billion-dollar-tax-free-piggy-bank | work = ProPublica | date = June 24, 2021 | accessdate = July 1, 2021 }}