Who died and left the US $7 billion?
Fascinating financial story about the largest single tax payment ever -> Who died and left the US $7 billion?
He was struck, though, by the appearance of that enormous deposit. “The degree by which this payment exceeds others in modern history — it’s not just, ‘Oh, this was the biggest one by 20%,’” Ricco said later. This was the biggest one by a factor of seven.
The data wasn’t erroneous, Treasury officials found, who are legally forbidden to discuss tax filings. But it was a mystery. Who died? And why didn’t they hire better tax attorneys?
It’s not just that this number is an outlier. These days, paying the estate tax is almost optional. Most estates aren’t taxed, and most people with an estate that is taxable — worth more than $13.6 million, or $27.2 million for a married couple — can afford to minimize its impact with careful tax planning and philanthropic largesse. When David Koch, the heir and conservative political activist, died in 2019, his reported $42.2 billion fortune didn’t leave a ripple in the estate-tax data. After that $7 billion payment, the next highest receipt since 2005 was just over $1 billion deposited on January 10, 2017.
And who is this guy?
The voice on the other end of the line was calling about my mysterious billionaire. A financial-services professional, the source was familiar with the handling of a certain large and publicly undervalued estate that matched the timing of the enormous payment.
Further, the person suggested that the late billionaire hadn’t sought to avoid the tax; they didn’t care about the bite being taken out of their fortune by the government, just as Behn suspected. The deceased was glad to pay up, this source said, because they came to the US as an immigrant and the country had provided them a huge opportunity.
The voice struck me as familiar with the world of high-end services available to family offices of the superwealthy. The tale seemed like a strange story to make up. If the family in question wanted to bask in the glow of public gratitude, why not simply announce it?
Of course, the phone number was a burner. But before they hung up, the source gave me a name for the nation’s late benefactor: Fayez Sarofim.
From afar, Sarofim fits the bill. A billionaire who existed largely beyond the eye of national news, he died in May 2022, and, most importantly to our purposes, made his fortune in opaque private-investment vehicles, not in publicly traded companies, over a six-decade career.
The son of an Egyptian landowner, Sarofim attended college in the US and moved to Houston in the 1950s. He soon hung out his shingle as an investment manager (reportedly with $100,000 from his father in hand) and gained a reputation for meticulous analysis, winning the business of Houston’s upper crust and managing the pensions of the companies they owned and universities they patronized.
Why thank you Fayez Sarofim!
Maybe it’s time to make Jefferson’s All-American Estate Tax cool & watertight again.
A power to dispose of estates for ever is manifestly absurd. The earth and the fullness of it belongs to every generation, and the preceding one can have no right to bind it up from posterity. Such extension of property is quite unnatural.
