> it took this many years for an article?

It took this many years for an article to be interesting enough to HN to be submitted...

Apple isn't the only company with this kind of deal, and California has been looking into them for years. For example, Williams-Sonoma is appealing a ruling against their deal with Shafter, also covered in Bloomberg Tax two years ago:

https://news.bloombergtax.com/daily-tax-report-state/william...

interestingly enough, there are a few goog execs who landed at willaims-sonoma...

Wasn't Jobs' Mercedes-Benz technically a lease? Because that probably made slightly more financial sense than to outright buy one every 180 days.

When I learned about the Jobs' car deal, I asked someone I knew in car sales about it. They said that most likely its a mundane 6 month lease that they were likely just repeatedly auto-renewing against the same vehicle until he chose to drive a different one, if at all.

This is the most probable scenario

Cool, so is that deal available to all?

Imagine as a non-billionaire/famous asking for such terms at purchase.

Ffs I was paying cash for a new car and they said they wanted to run my credit.. I said FU and had to threaten to leave if they wanted the sale, why run credit on a cash purchase?

But I don't expect that most dealers will give you a jobs-like deal? Or is this normal?

It’s a short-term car lease. Nothing new.

Thanks, I was led to believe all these years that he had some sort of weird loophole he was exploiting... and I always found that weird, like, he had enough money to buy a new car every day if he wanted, so I never understood the impetus.

> it took this many years for an article?

It took this many years for CDTFA audit to be started, completed, and the city to be told it needs to end the program, which is what the article is ultimately about.

Given the total amount identified and the per-year current amount, the amount seems likely to have been small potatoes for most of the life of the program. In 1998, a lot more of the business was brick and mortar, and it was before even the iPod, much less the iPhone, was introduced.