r/nextfuckinglevel • u/matori_tester • 1d ago

Billionaire speaker Robert F. Smith tells 400 graduates he's paying off all their student loans ($40 million in total)

Enable HLS to view with audio, or disable this notification

13.0k Upvotes

92% Upvoted

580 comments sorted by

View all comments

4

u/Admirable-Way-5266 1d ago

Did he actually pay out? Or was this just a tax dodge/empty promise?

5

u/skatopher 1d ago

All donations can be tax deductible with some limited exceptions

14

u/idkfly_casual 1d ago edited 1d ago

I don’t think people understand this. If you made $100M in 2024 and you donate $43M of it, you are absolutely out $43M. You can deduct some of it from your taxes as a charitable donation and that lowers your taxable income for the year, but you don’t get that $43M back. It is a deduction, not a credit.

2

u/vertigo1083 1d ago

The vast majority of the country does their taxes through services like H&R block and Turbotax. They stay ignorant because it's easier to just automate it for themselves every year. I'd be willing to bet that if you went out into a city street and asked 100 people how a tax deductible works-

More than half will be wrong. And a good amount of the wrong ones will be staunchly confident in their knowledge.

1

u/granular_grain 1d ago

It doesn’t help that the U.S. tax code is unnecessarily complex and guess who lobbies to keep it that way, you guess it, places like H&R Block.