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Is black billionaire Robert Smith still a role model to black kids?

loud-ninja said:
See, all we needed was clarification. You said we should know these rich people and then left it like that.

I can agree with what you said in regards to people's journey. Hell, I get motivated by some of my friends that had turbulent past but was able to overcome and didnt give up. They are not rich at all. But ambition in people is what I like to see.
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i think the issue is people get caught on the money part.
i understand clarification......but how i think..i saw his journey....without clarification ...someone else thought i meant only money.

but i think people should know who is for inspiration......just like they know lebron, eddie murphy, hell even lavar ball.

i feel like we have too much negative and need the positive highlighted and that persons accomplishments regardless.
no telling who looks up to who. we dont have to like that person but we should celebrate do the thing within the shitty system thats against us at every level and only gets worse the higher you get.
 
im sure the black dude ...the skateboard dude gets mad racists shit said to him...we gotta celebrate him for being the best. he didnt regardless of them.
so many examples.
 
Happened to see this while looking for something else.
Neither he nor his industry is a role model. Its a poster child for greed & imma repost what i put in that other thread.

Sure we can post that stuff that shows his business model (private equity) is a cancer that sucks the blood out of this country and harms more than it helps, but you dont really care because, you just love headlines.
We got wealthy people that rig a system to steal from everyone, then they give a lil bit of it back (then ask for a tax write off)and we always get people who think they're hero's. Works everytime.


www.wbur.org

Generosity Is Good. Affordable College Would Be Better

Robert Smith's gift is an act of generosity that is necessary because of austere economic policies he and his fellow billionaires have championed, writes Miles Howard.
www.wbur.org www.wbur.org

a few excerpts
Smith's gift is a Spartacus-sized act of generosity in a landscape whose disparity can be traced to austere economic policies pushed by billionaires like Smith himself. (Those policies include cutting funding for public education.) As philanthropy journalist Anand Giridharadas noted, Smith opposes closing the carried interest loophole — a piece of tax code that enriches tech investors while costing the government as much as $18 billion a year. That sum of money could replicate Smith’s graduation gift 50 times each year.
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The apparent hang-up here, for billionaire philanthropists who’ve fought against progressive tax reforms like nixing the carried-interest loophole, isn’t just forking over more of their wealth when tax season rolls around -- it’s also the control they cede when taxes are used to deliver justice to the economically underprivileged. In our society, where philanthropists play an outsized role in delivering justice to a select few, most of us have little hope except begging billionaires for money through processes like grant writing — which is essentially speculative mind-reading -- or simply dreaming that someday, like the Morehouse Class of 2019, we’ll be handpicked for the payout of a lifetime.

There’s a reason why Smith’s gift to Morehouse students has the optics of a lottery payout. Philanthropy is, by nature, a lottery.
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But in a different kind of society where the government ensures that everybody has access to free higher education — funded substantially by Nordic-style taxes on income and wealth — billionaires won’t get to decide how “their money” is spent.
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Philanthropy, at its most insidious, can persuade us that the wealthy are the only ones who can fix society and that we should trust this task to them, and not the government. But “the government,” while imperfect and corrupted by the influence of the wealthy, still remains within our control. People will gaze at Robert Smith’s present to the Morehouse students and think, “I wish more rich people would do something like that.”

Wishing won’t help us. But voting might.
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Post was too big so heres pt.2

But the my main post is this, he didnt start caring about black people or charities till after he got caught for tax evasion.



Eventually, however, the risks of his old deal with Brockman became manifest: Sometime between November 2013 and January 2014, Smith received a clue that U.S. tax officials were scrutinizing his accounts.
During that period, officials at a Swiss bank advised Smith the bank was going to participate in a U.S. Justice Department program for the disclosure of Americans’ overseas accounts, according to Smith’s statement. The bank requested that Smith waive the secrecy of his account and recommended he apply to a voluntary IRS program to disclose foreign money.
Smith applied for the IRS program in March 2014 but was quickly rejected. This is typically a sign the agency already is scrutinizing the applicant’s tax filings, former federal prosecutors said.
When a person’s application to the program is rejected in this manner, “the IRS is basically telling you ... that the IRS knows something about you or is looking at your returns already,” said George Abney, a former prosecutor in the Justice Department’s tax division who is now in private practice. “It could be something small, or it could be something large, as it appears to have been in this case.”
The standard legal advice, in such situations, Abney said, “is to go ahead and fix everything. That way if the IRS does come knocking, you can tell them we’ve already corrected the problem and that will put you in a better light.”
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It is about this time that Smith became a major philanthropist, frequently making headlines with his generosity.
He’d previously used $13 million in untaxed funds to make improvements to a residence in Colorado and fund “charitable activities at the property,” the Justice Department said in a news release announcing its deal with Smith. That property appears to be Lincoln Hills, established in the 1920s to offer Black people a mountain getaway in the era of segregation. Smith converted it into a vacation home for his family and used it to host former foster children and trafficking victims. He also co-founded a nonprofit, Lincoln Hills Cares, that provides outdoor opportunities for Colorado’s underprivileged youth.
His big foray into philanthropy started in 2014, when he established the Fund II Foundation, and filled its coffers with over $182 million in assets from the offshore accounts where he had hidden his income, according to the Justice Department and the foundation’s tax filings.
Why Smith initiated so much charity at this point is unclear. But over the same period, Smith’s personal life and his business were undergoing major upheavals.
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The same month, Smith and his partners sold a minority stake in Vista Equity Partners to another private equity firm, a move that probably would have enriched him, better enabling him to become a donor.
The charity moves also might have been strategic, too, some tax experts said. If the money in the offshore entities was going to good causes, the tax evasion might strike prosecutors and juries as less wrongful.
The large donation to his foundation came from a Belize-based trust called Excelsior, which Smith controlled, and consisted of shares in a second offshore entity, a Nevis-based shell company called Flash, according to the foundation’s tax filings and statements by the Justice Department. These were the same entities Smith had established in 2000 in his agreement with Brockman, according to Smith’s statement. As part of his agreement with the federal government, Smith admits that he used those entities to hide over $200 million in income.
The foundation states on its website that the money in those entities was always meant to go toward charity. The foundation was formed pursuant to an agreement between Smith’s private equity firm, Vista Equity Partners, and the Bermuda-based company that Brockman had created to invest in the Vista fund. The foundation says the parties agreed that when the fund wound down, any leftover assets would be given to charity.
But according to the statement Smith signed with prosecutors, Smith “knowingly and intentionally falsely claimed that this charitable contribution was required as part of an agreement” with Brockman
Regardless of these charitable donations from the offshore entities, however, some attorneys said, Smith is fortunate to have avoided criminal prosecution, especially given the scale of the tax evasion.
“The idea of a billionaire tax cheat getting immunity to cooperate against another billionaire tax cheat strikes a lot of people as out of step,” said Justin Weddle, a former federal prosecutor who handled several large tax cases and is now in private practice. “For Smith to get a non-prosecution agreement for cooperation is very unusual.”.
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Under his deal with federal prosecutors, Smith abandons claims for a $182 million tax refund, which consisted partly of claims for charitable deductions that he made in 2018 and 2019, the Justice Department said.
Weddle noted, too, that the tax evasion scheme strikes him as a particularly ill-advised strategy for both Brockman and Smith, because while it might have saved them tens of millions of dollars, those amounts are small compared to their huge fortunes.
“It strikes me as dumb,” Weddle said. Smith “was risking criminal prosecution for a tiny portion of his portfolio.”
To review his tax situation, Smith had earlier hired tax attorneys including Charles Rettig, whom President Trump appointed as IRS commissioner in 2018, according to two people familiar with the hiring but who were not permitted to speak publicly. It is unknown what advice Rettig or the other tax experts gave Smith.
“The Commissioner did not have any role in the DoJ investigation into Robert Smith,” the IRS said in statement. “Without acknowledging whether the Commissioner represented any particular client in any particular matter while he was in private practice, the Commissioner recused himself from all such matters upon taking office.”
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Tax experts said wealthy people such as Smith can reap significant financial benefits from their charitable gifts and can enhance their public reputations.
“It’s certainly a very troubling case in terms of shining a light on the extent to which wealthy Americans are avoiding taxes through offshore vehicles,” said Ray Madoff, a professor at Boston College and an expert on philanthropy and taxation. "On the charitable side, it raises questions about people’s ability to offset significant taxable income with charitable donations.”
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