Norway Shrugged

> facing an unrealized gains wealth tax bill many times higher than my net income…. I still don’t know how I was supposed to pay the tax

…Perhaps by realizing a portion of the gains and handing over the resulting wealth?

Is the Norwegian government’s theory that a modern company might never realize their gains, and avoid taxation indefinitely, and thus this is a forcing mechanism to extract some tax revenue?

the author founded dune.com which is a crypto onchain data company. there is a focus on ethereum, solana, tron, stablecoins, prediction markets and the like.

the viral tweets critizing the wealth tax are by elon musk, marc andreessen, paul graham and alex svanevik (also an onchain data founder). certainly what they have in common here is that they would stand to lose some wealth from the wealth tax!

How narcissistic do you have to be to come up with a title like this about yourself?

It reminds me of that study that found that people who serve in executive roles for prolonged periods of time develop a sort of brain damage where their "mirroring" neural process becomes impaired.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/07/power-c...

TL;DR: Norway imposes a wealth tax that taxes unrealized gains at approximately 1% annually. "Wealth" here includes the book value of private companies, which presents cash flow problems for founders of startups with high paper valuations (like the author, who founded unicorn Dune Analytics).

I'm still finding it hard to be terribly sympathetic towards the author, and the constant Ayn Rand references don't help. If you're worth 100 million dollars on paper, is it really that hard to come up with 1 million to pay the taxman? Sell 1% of those shares, get a loan secured by those shares, etc.

Oh god, this guy instantly lost credibility to me for mentioning Atlas Shrugged.

What are the train references all over the text? is it because of the tax?

Slop. Feels like a child onesided complaining and detached from a regular reality.

You are not a fugitive, just because you are expected to contribute to society.

The teenagey reference to Atlas Shrugged, a book that hails selfishness as the highest human virtue, coupled with the sloppy writing makes me highly suspicious of the competence of the author. Good riddance for Norway I guess.

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