There are actually very few "loopholes" available to individuals.
What most accountants call "loopholes" are actually just misunderstandings of the tax rules (e.g., the home office deduction, home business expense deductions, hiring family members being some of the biggest), and their clients usually end up paying penalties the IRS if they get audited.
Or tax situations that aren't taken advantage of! There are folks who are definitely brave about using those deductions, but there are also people that can who don't. That's what I meant by "loophole" here.
Is your spouse an independent contractor? Do you own a home? Do you have stock options? Do you have a home office? These alone are enough to make some pretty creative reporting situations.
Those questions all have discrete answers, including the much-misunderstood home office. The correct tax outcomes are very much deterministic, in the sense that the same inputs always result in the same outputs. It's simply that there are a lot of options to change the inputs (for example, choosing FIFO vs LIFO for stock sales, using an S-corp vs a sole proprietorship for a personal business).
For example, the home office deduction is only available to individuals who have a home office that is used exclusively for their individual business, not as an employee for someone else's business (the only exception being for flow-through entities where the taxpayer is a shareholder/partner). The "exclusive use" is meant in the all-or-nothing sense. Use your office computer after hours for games? The home office deduction no longer applies. Uses the office space to store personal documents, or really any other activity except for the business activity? The HOD no longer applies. Don't have any income from that business activity you claim are doing in the home office? The HOD no longer applies.
It's simply that enforcement is not deterministic, so people think they get away with a lot of positions that do not survive actual audits. Talk to an IRS agent that handles audits and you'll learn that a failed home office deduction claim is the #2 adjustment to the tax returns of white collar professionals.[1] At a relatively recent tax mixer, IRS agents from the Los Angeles branch office could only recall about a dozen cases in which the home office deduction actually survived an audit, out of thousands, and those taxpayers were extremely rigorous about following the rules to the letter (to the extent that all of them locked their home offices when they were not being used for work).
[1] The #1 reason for adjustments to the tax returns of white collar professionals is attempting to claim business expense deductions without matching business income to deduct against. Technically, the home office deduction is one of these deductions, which is why it is #2 and not #1.
There are also a lot of non-deterministinc choices one can make. Things like carry forward losses or gains, that no algorithm could know. They depend on your personal plans for the future. You can make specific filing choices that have massive consequences on your future. There are choices like 83(b) elections that can save you tens of millions of dollars a decade in the future, contingent on the events after you file.
The non-profit received shares in the for-profit as a result of the transfer. Those shares are theoretically worth hundreds of billions.
If it had been a for-profit company contributing assets to another for-profit company, the transaction would not have had any different tax consequence.
A state of limitations case is actually one of the strongest kinds of legal defenses a defendant can have.
It's a foundational issue that goes to whether the court is even allowed to proceed with the case. A defendant could be guilty/liable/whatever of the alleged claims, and it wouldn't matter. If the statute of limitations has run, they're in the clear.
The only counter to an SOL defense is to try and claim that the SOL was paused for some reason, but those exceptions are very narrow and wouldn't apply here (and in the real world very rarely apply to civil cases).
No. Once the jury made its finding of fact as to when the event giving rise to the claim occurred (and to when the SOL clock would start ticking), the appeal would have to determine that the jury could not have reasonably made such a finding. It's very, very rare for an appeals court to overturn a finding of fact.
New evidence is usually irrelevant, except in the very narrow circumstance where the statute of limitations is based on a "knew or should have known" moment instead of a "when the incident occurred" moment. (In this context, meaning the first time the plaintiff actually knew, or reasonably should have known, about the incident for which they are suing. Some torts allow for this, most don't.)
The was actually what was at issue here. The inciting incident was way past the statute of limitations on an occurrence basis (years late), but Elon was attempting to claim that there was "new evidence" to reset the start of the clock. He failed, because there was substantial evidence that he knew about the stuff he was suing over when it originally happened.
Honestly surprised he wasn't held in contempt for perjury.
Nobody else has come forward because the number of people with a potential legal claim for asserting any such harm was a small group of between 2 and 6 people, of which Musk was one (setting aside SOL issues).
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