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Comment by djoldman | Hacker News Reader

For the tax or corp. lawyers:

Is it possible for some clever business person to start a non-profit, amass a bundle of money, convert to for-profit, and then own the bundle of money to do with as they see fit? If yes, I'd assume there would be tax implications in that the bundle of money would be some ~70% after paying the gov.

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Not a lawyer, but my local university (a registered non-profit) had an AI department that took in a ton of grant money before they rolled it out into a for-profit.

The "founders" got fat salaries and bonuses after the conversion. They then started going around town hyping their success and whitewashing the history of the "startup" as if it was bootstrapped.

I have no idea how they managed to legally pull that off...

If your name is Scam Altman then it's a breeze to do so

Not quite a breeze, to be fair. You gotta manufacture a bit of drama, install bad actors in key positions, pull media strings, etc.

But yeah it can be done.

> Is it possible for some clever business person to start a non-profit, amass a bundle of money, convert to for-profit, and then own the bundle of money to do with as they see fit?

Not a lawyer, but as the Ghost Foundation is not a charity, the trustees can currently do whatever they want with the money.

Their about page claims non profit, Wikipedia and others say registered in Singapore but I don’t see anything under “ghost” as a society [0] or as a charity [1]. For something that has “believe in being transparent” in the about page, the lack of any registration number or a link to the touted constitution is odd.

DNS registrant is from West Yorkshire, GB [2].

0. https://eservices2.mha.gov.sg/ros/search-society

1. https://authoring.charities.gov.sg/

2. https://www.whois.com/whois/ghost.org

> Their about page claims non profit, Wikipedia and others say registered in Singapore but I don’t see anything under “ghost” as a society [0] or as a charity [1].

Ghost Foundation is a Company Limited by Guarantee [1] in Singapore. The UEN is 201605007D.

As I wrote above, it's not a charity, and therefore doesn't need to have charitable goals.

[1] https://ghost.org/changelog/moving-to-singapore/

Seems like it’s filings and meetings are done about this time of year. [0] The move to Singapore is super interesting, esp with dsivers input. Thanks for linking to it.

0. https://www.tis.bizfile.gov.sg/ngbtisinternet/faces/oracle/w...

Not a lawyer, my understanding is no- assets must be disposed to another non profit with a similar mission. The specifics of disposition being determined by the particular state

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