Gabriel Zucman

speaker

169 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Aug 2026 last heard 5 Aug

Gabriel Zucman’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.

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The David Pakman Show · Surrender, betrayal, and the collapse of promises · 5 Aug 2026 podcast

perspective of the tax law well uh you're not going to have any income tax to pay and that's exactly what he did as ceo of amazon he didn't pay himself a wage amazon didn't distribute dividends so he didn't have to pay taxes on dividend income right and he didn't sell shares

And so he didn't realize capital gains, and so he paid no capital gains tax.

So he really looked like the poor person from the perspective of the tax law, the income tax law, even though he's one of the wealthiest person in the world.

And so once you've understood this, you've understood that the proper way to tax the super rich like Bezos is not with the income tax, but is with some form of tax that's based on wealth because income is very easy to manipulate when you're extremely rich, but wealth is much harder to manipulate.

So wealth is the total value of all the assets that you own real estate, but mostly for rich people, financial assets, equity shares in companies and so on net of any debt.

Now,

To your concern about, okay, those rich guys are going to avoid a wealth tax by borrowing money, I don't think that's an issue because if you borrow money,

Well, you go to the bank, borrow $1 billion.

Okay.

But now you have $1 billion in assets on your bank account.

So your net wealth has not changed at all.

Of course, if you consume that billion dollars, then, okay, your wealth goes down, but you

You are getting poorer, so that's okay.

But what I want to emphasize is that borrowing money does not mechanically reduce your wealth.

It's a fair summary that the two best functioning wealth tax is today in the world.

of those of Switzerland and Norway.

That's fair.

And I think I'd go even further than you.

I think the historical and the international experience with wealth taxation by and large is not a success.

It's a pretty big failure.

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