Maybe Cook got this idea when he met Trump last week?
Wow I managed to stump the band with this one. Nobody has any comments?
Well, if they also get Tennessee Avenue and St. James Place they can build hotels and charge everybody who lands there through the nose.
I say let Santa Clara County use eminent domain to take the property for $200 and then start charging Apple rent. Or just sell it.
Any company that lowballs on such a claim should be treated that way.
"Hey, you said it was worth … "
Heh. The Kings of Denmark used to make a lot of their revenue charging tolls on ships passing through the Danish straits. Supposedly, rather than making everyone unload their cargo and then inspecting it (which would be time consuming), they’d just ask the ship captain what he was carrying and how much it was worth, then take their cut based on that declaration. The trick was that they reserved the right to buy your cargo on the spot, at whatever price you claimed it was worth.
If Apple’s tax returns were in a Library, they would be in the “Young Adult Fiction” section.
There are, obviously, laws which generally prevent this type of thing. Property taxes are common and if people could just arbitrarily set their assessment as low as they wanted, everyone would do it. If an ordinary property owner tried this, the government would send over a public assessor and they would inform the owner what the value of their property was - and tax them based on that figure.
But things can be different at high levels. Apple may find it cheaper to pay some legislators to rewrite the law in their favor than it would be to pay the taxes on their property’s true value.
One thing about Apple is their crap don’t stink, way more than other businesses think that.
A lot of Apple fans think Jobs was the second coming. He seemed to think that himself, thought he did not need silly old doctors to treat cancer. Guess he bet wrong on that one.
For quite a few years now the highest ROI a company can get is donating to select politicians (committee chairs and such).
Rich and influential people have always sought to receive preferential treatment; that’s just the nature of self-interest. But it’s generally limited by the self-interests of people who aren’t rich or influential acting as a counterweight.
What’s new is the way rich and influential people are now able to convince so many poor and powerless people to support political platforms that are weighed in favor of the rich and influential and against the poor and powerless.
If they don’t want to pay taxes, they could just have their HQ building take off and return to the mother ship.
Why not just declare their operating system a religion and their building a temple. No taxes.
Shhh. Don’t give them any ideas.
Remember when Apple were the Good Guys and Bill Gates was the Bad Guy?
Many, many people spend lots and lots of time with head bowed over their iPhones. It’s already a de facto religion.
Here’s what I don’t get. The linked article happens to say this: “Apple is now valued at $1 trillion. It is also the county’s biggest taxpayer, paying $56 million in the 2017–2018 tax year.”
Apple profits last year were about $50 Billion. How are they paying a net tax rate of 0.1%?
Never mind, the article said the $56M is just what they pay to that county.
Seems to me you could design a nice little board game around this, similar to Sheriff of Nottingham.