What Yvon Chouinard, CEO of Patagonia, has done is absolutely revolutionary and ground-breaking

[Blue Owl]

https://www.patagonia.com/home/

I hope more corporations follow his lead and ditch the greed. Mad props to this guy and his vision for a better planet!

[Lucinda]

1. ❤️ ✿❧🌿❧✿ ❤️

[WhiteTara]

2. he didn't walk away broke

he profited mightily on his incredible gift.

[JanMichael]

3. If more billionaires did this we could end poverty. But outside of Chouinard and MacKenzie Scott

Most of them just want more money and phallic spaceships.

Again if more billionaires did this I might not be so hard Left.

[DinahMoeHum]

4. Hate to rain on this parade. . .BUT. . .

. . .there were apparently ulterior motives for Yvon Chouinard’s maneuver. And apparently it is a popular move among billionaires on BOTH the right AND the left of the political spectrum.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/16/business/dealbook/philanthropy-patagonia-billionaires-way-taxes.html

. . .tax experts have homed in on parallels between the green-minded Chouinard family and Barre Seid, the Republican billionaire who gifted $1.6 billion from the sale of his company to a conservative political action group. In each case, the donors appear to have avoided huge federal estate and gift taxes.

“From what I’ve seen, they’re doing the same thing,” Ray Madoff, a professor specializing in tax law at Boston College Law School, told DealBook. “The only difference is the politics.”

It’s all about the 501(c)(4). The Chouinards and Seid effectively donated their companies to 501(c)(4) organizations, which can make unlimited political donations. People who transfer assets to these organizations can’t take deductions from their income taxes, but they can avoid estate and gift taxes.

And it’s all about the estate and gift taxes. Both donations avoided capital gains taxes, though there were other ways of doing so. More notably, they avoid estate and gift taxes, which come in at 40 percent. Such donations can minimize the tax hit that billionaires would otherwise pay on huge gifts and inheritances. Donating to 501(c)(4) groups is entirely legal — and its usefulness in avoiding gift and estate taxes is growing in popularity across the political spectrum.

Madoff views these gifts as a failure of government policy. “We are letting people opt out of the support of the government that the rest of us have to participate in”

(more at the above link)

[applegrove]

5. The owners of the Guardian Newspaper did something similar.