Peter Thiel turned a Roth IRA into a $5B tax-free piggy bank
Utterly astounded and dismayed to see this much of HN&#x27;s audience completely fail to comprehend what they&#x27;ve read here and paint this as some sort of sinister theft.<p>This is the law functioning as intended.  Thiel&#x27;s case is a one-in-100-million+ event.  He may have the only Roth IRA in existence that&#x27;s valued at over $5 billion.  But he didn&#x27;t do it by exploiting some sort of &quot;loophole&quot; or paying high-priced accountants to shield his assets in foreign entities offshore.  He put his investments in a Roth IRA just like any of you can do.  The only difference is his investments were in the top 0.0001% in terms of performance.  That&#x27;s generally how people get to be billionaires.<p>And that&#x27;s not even to mention that the assets in a Roth IRA are essentially worthless to him - he&#x27;s not old enough to make withdrawals or take distributions tax-free and you can&#x27;t borrow against a Roth IRA.  The funds are essentially unavailable to him for years to come unless he wants to pay taxes and penalties.<p>Again - this isn&#x27;t a tax dodge.  This is someone who used the law exactly as intended without any illegal or shady dealings and happened to be incredibly fortunate.<p>The whole article is a hit piece designed to get whip people into a furor.  And lately I&#x27;ve been noticing propublica publishing a lot of those.