You know what sucks about coming into a large sum of money? Being forced to hand over a large chunk of that large sum to grabby old Uncle Sam. In America, hefty fees await winners of both the lottery and the stock market alike. It's like the old saying: the only two things certain in life are death and taxes.
Or are they?
Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin, also known as Andrew Garfield's character in the Hollywood motion picture The Social Network, has cannily dodged a large portion of the taxes he would owe the U.S. government after his company's IPO by renouncing his citizenship to the United States of America.
Saverin, instead, will become a citizen of Singapore— where he first decamped last fall, Bloomberg reports.
Though he hasn't been active in the management of Facebook for years (remember how Jesse Eisenberg/Mark Zuckerberg stabbed him in the back?), Saverin still owns approximately four percent of the company, which, for those keeping score at home, will soon be worth something like $4 billion.
In Singapore, which doesn't have a capital gains tax, the 30-year-old Brazil-native will only be subject to a small fraction of the taxes that he would face in America. Zuckerberg for instance, stands to owe up to $2 billion in taxes for his Facebook shares, according to some estimates.
