100% agree that propublica didn’t do a good job, but the question remains, if somebody makes the claim that some billionaire sold some stock at long term gain prices, then in at least some tax year you would expect that massive amount of money to dwarf any losses they had, so if they truly paid long term cap gains then in one particular year their tax rate should be close to 15%. But if it’s not over long periods of time, then they have some massive method of offsetting gains. People saying “oh but they pay capital gains” or “oh they offset with losses” doesn’t make any actual sense if the numbers are huge. Like imagine some billionaire explaining to his buddy, “yea I didn’t pay any tax on the 1B in stock I sold last year because I offsetted the gains with 150M in losses rather than paying the taxes, aren’t you impressed?” Its like huh? It seems like way more likely the “losses” are actually paper losses like a building cost depreciating in value “supposedly” but actually it does not depreciate like that in reality.. so it would be great to see how this stuff works over some period of time rather than just in random one off cases.

Maybe the trick is simply just borrow for your whole life then when you die pay back the loans but somehow that payback process results in limited taxes somehow.