Of Cakes, Having & Eating
The story of Ted Weschler's remarkable savings account and of rank hypocrisy and financial illiteracy of our governing classes
Ted Weschler is one of those irritating human beings who appear not only to be thoughtful, intelligent, highly disciplined and savvy, but also a thoroughly decent man, humble, funny, modest and dedicated to his family. Sickening really.
This recent interview on the “I am Home” podcast recorded prior to this year’s Berkshire Hathaway Inc. AGM in Omaha is a wonderful introduction to the man and his career. I dare you to listen to it and NOT come away both liking and respecting the guy.
[As an aside:
provided a complete transcript and some commentary on the interview on his Substack recently here].The story of Ted Weschler’s IRA (Individual Retirement Account) is the stuff of which investment legends are made and serves - as Ted wants it too - as an outstanding illustration and hopefully motivation for young people starting their earning and savings careers of what is possible, given the right mindset and discipline.
The Washington Post picked up a story first published by ProPublica, a decidedly left leaning online news media channel which describes itself as “ a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power.” whose primary focus in the piece entitled “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” was Peter Thiel, a venture capitalist whose initial successes included a stake in Paypal. Progressives love to paint the distinctly non-progressive Thiel as a modern day Lucifer and the article played to the gallery by describing his use of a Roth IRA retirement account as a diabloical plot to defraud the US government and by extension the “hard-working Americans” they represent:
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.
To put that into perspective, here’s how much the average Roth was worth at the end of 2018: $39,108.
~ ProPublica article “Lord of the Roths” June 2021
There are so many things wrong with this description that it is hard to know where to start, but let’s try and list a few shall we, because the arguments will apply equally to the controversy over Ted Weschler’s retirement account as well.
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