Bottjer CPA

@the_jefferymead @ChrisMurphyCT Mr. Mead, the senator does not understand GAAP/IFRS nor the IRC. It’s not his fault, it is a complex system. He could educate himself, but that may result in facts that do not fit a narrative.

@ChrisMurphyCT That’s not rigging an economy. Why don’t you tell us how much each of them paid in payroll taxes? Or why don’t you mention how much employees paid in income taxes due to these businesses providing job opportunities for people? You people are always trying to take more money.

Our current economy is rigged. It just is. A new report shows that 88 of the largest companies in America, including: Amazon Citigroup Haliburton Kohl's Palantir PayPal PG&E Southwest Airlines Tesla United Airlines Disney paid ZERO corporate income tax last year.

@timburchett Chinet….must be nice.

I didn’t get an invite to the State Dinner tonight so I microwaved some frozen bread and had some PB&J instead.

As you go to work today and settle into the week, please study the form below. You will soon need to fill this out EVERY year and tell the government what you own and then allow them to tell you how much its worth. That is the framework that is enabled by the Trojan Horse "Billionaire Tax" that is trying to get passed. Give them credit: they cleverly use Billionaires as the hook, but build in the language and the framework that will allow the Legislature to simply extend the tax to everyone and make it yearly. And this is where the form below comes in... In this case, ask yourself, will it be you or the Billionaires that will be able to fill this out properly and avoid penalties. As much as Billionaires can be pushed to do more for society, we all know that they have the infrastructure to manage these kinds of disclosures...middle class Californians do not and they will be the ones that get penalized in the end.

@Eric_M_Courage Many years ago I showed my wife her tax bill (insert tears) she felt all of her hard work was being stolen (she had a successful Etsy shop back when it was truly handmade). “I don’t want to pay that? Does that make me a Republican or Democrat?” I think it makes you American

My wife is in shock. Baffled at how her small business—at her income level—pays SO MUCH in taxes. - How is that fair?! - What do they even do with MY money!? Doesn’t believe my calculations: NI - Taxes: Fed + Self-Employment+ CO = Thinks I need to run optimizations on MFS vs. MFJ. Welcome to my Sunday brunch at my house.

@friedberg @Jason I’m getting the sense that his CPAs didn’t plan accordingly, JCal got hit with a “Sir, you owe…” and he’s upset

@Jason your best tweet ever

@ScottPresler Id love to help next if you need it.

Paid my taxes. 100% of my income is from social media. I don’t take any PAC money (not even from my own organization) & I don’t take any funds from foreign countries. Working for you all day — every single day.

@BasedMikeLee @HumbleFlow The Afrikaner’s story is very similar to that of the LDS.

@HumbleFlow Good point

A white South African whose family has been in Africa for 400 years is a "colonizer" with no homeland. But a man who crossed the U.S. border illegally yesterday is a “fellow American” with full moral authority.

@TeslaAIBot When do you go on sale?

Hello humans 👋

@BillAckman Most business owners do not have the time or capital to create positive legal precedent. If successful, the positive precedent could benefit business owners for years to come.

I am reaching out to the @X community for advice with the likely risk of sharing TMI. I have been sufficiently upset about the whole matter that I have lost sleep thinking about it and I am hoping that this post will enable me to get this matter off my chest. By way of background, I started a family office called TABLE about 15 years ago and hired a friend who had previously managed a family office, and years earlier, had been my personal accountant. She is someone that I trusted implicitly and consider to be a good person. The office started small, but over the last decade, the number of personnel and the cost of the office grew massively. The growth was entirely on the operational side as the investment team has remained tiny. While my investment portfolio grew substantially, the investments I had made were almost entirely passive and TABLE simply needed to account for them and meet capital calls as they came in. While TABLE purchased additional software and other systems that were supposed to improve productivity, the team kept increasing in size at a rapid rate, and the expenses continued to grow even faster. While I would periodically question the growing expenses and high staff turnover, I stayed uninvolved with the office other than a once-a-year meeting when I briefly reviewed the operations and the financials and determined bonus compensation for the President and the CFO. I spent no time with any of the other employees or the operations. The whole idea behind TABLE was that it would handle everything other than my day job so that I would have more time for my job and my family. Over the last six years, expenses ballooned even further, employee turnover accelerated, and I became concerned that all was not well at TABLE. It was time for me to take a look at what was going on. Nearly four years ago, I recruited my nephew who had recently graduated from Harvard and put him to work at Bremont, a British watchmaker, one of my only active personal investments to figure out the issues at the company and ultimately assist in executing a turnaround. He did a superb job. When he returned from the UK late last year after a few years at Bremont, I asked him to help me figure out what was going on with TABLE. When I explained to TABLE’s president what he would be doing, she became incredibly defensive, which naturally made me more concerned. My nephew went to work by first meeting with each employee to understand their roles at the company and to learn from them what ideas they had on how things could be improved. He got an earful. Our first step in helping to turn around TABLE was a reduction in force including the president and about a third of the team, retaining excellent talent that had been desperate for new leadership. Now here is where I need your advice. All but one of the employees who were terminated acted professionally and were gracious on the way out (excluding the president who had a notice period in her contract, is currently still being paid, and with whom I have not yet had a discussion). The highest compensated terminated employee other than the president, an in-house lawyer (let’s call her Ronda), told us that three months of severance was not enough and demanded two years’ severance despite having worked at the company for only two and one half years. When I learned of Ronda's request for severance, I offered to speak with her to understand what she was thinking, but she refused to do so. A few days ago, we received a threatening letter from a Silicon Valley law firm. In the letter, Ronda’s counsel suggests that her termination is part of longstanding issues of ‘harassment and gender discrimination’ – an interesting claim in light of the fact that Ronda was in charge of workplace compliance – and that her termination was due to: “unlawful, retaliatory, and harmful conduct directed towards her. Both [Ronda] and I [Ronda’s lawyer] have spoken with you about [Ronda’s] view of what a reasonable resolution would include given the circumstances. Thus far, TABLE has refused to provide any substantive response. This letter provides the last opportunity to reach a satisfactory agreement. If we cannot do so, [Ronda] will seek all appropriate relief in a court of competent jurisdiction.” The letter goes on to explain the basis for the “unsafe work environment” claim at TABLE: “In early 2026, Pershing Square’s founder Bill Ackman installed his nephew in an unidentified role at TABLE, Ackman’s family office. [His nephew]—whose only work experience had been for TABLE where he was seconded abroad for the last four years to a UK watch company held by Ackman—began appearing at TABLE’s offices and conducting interviews of employees without a clear explanation of his role or the purposes of these interviews. During this period, he made a series of inappropriate and genderbased [sic] comments to multiple employees that created an unsafe work environment. Among other things, [his nephew] made remarks about female employees’ ages (“Tell me you are nowhere near 40”), physical appearance (“Your body does not look like you have kids”), as well as intrusive questions about family planning and sexual orientation (“Who carried your son? Who will carry your next child?”). These incidents were reported to senior leadership at TABLE and Pershing Square. Rather than being addressed appropriately, the response from senior management reflected, at best, willful blindness to the inappropriateness of [his nephew]’s remarks and, at worst, tacit endorsement.” The above allegations about my nephew had previously been brought to my attention by TABLE’s president when they occurred. When I learned of them, I told the president that I would speak to him directly and encouraged her to arrange for him to get workplace sensitivity training. The president assured me that she would do so. When I spoke to my nephew, he explained what he actually had said and how his actual remarks had been received, not at all as alleged in the legal letter from Ronda’s counsel. I have also spoken to others at the lunch table who confirmed his description of the facts. In any case, he meant no harm, was simply trying to build rapport with other employees, and no one, as far as I understand, was offended. Ironically, Ronda claims in her legal letter that TABLE didn’t take HR compliance seriously, yet Ronda was in charge of HR compliance at TABLE and the person who gave my nephew his workplace sensitivity training after the alleged incidents. In any case, Ronda, as head of compliance, should have kept a record or raised an alarm if indeed there was pervasive harassment or other such problems at the company, and there is no evidence whatsoever that this is true. So why does Ronda believe she can get me to pay her nearly $2 million, i.e., two years of severance, nearly one year of severance for each of her years at the company? Well, here is where some more background would be helpful. Over the last two months, I have been consumed with a major family medical issue – one of my older daughters had a massive brain hemorrhage on February 5th and has since been making progress on her recovery – and I am in the midst of a major transaction for my company which I am executing from a hospital room office next to her . While the latter business matter is publicly known, the details of my daughter’s situation are only known to Ronda because of her role at our family office. Now, let’s get back to the subject at hand. Unfortunately, while New York and many other states have employment-at-will, there has emerged an industry of lawyers who make a living from bringing fake gender, race, LGBTQ and other discrimination employment claims in order to extract larger severance payments for terminated employees, and it needs to stop. The fake claim system succeeds because it costs little to have a lawyer send a threatening letter and nearly all of the lawyers in this field work on contingency so there is no or minimal cash cost to bring a claim. And inevitably, nearly 100% of these claims are settled because the public relations and legal costs of defending them exceed the dollar cost of the settlement. The claims are nearly always settled with a confidentiality agreement where the employee who asserts the fake claims remains anonymous and as a result, there is no reputational cost to bringing false claims. The consequences of this sleazy system (let’s call it ‘the System’) are the increased costs of doing business which is a tax on the economy and society. There are other more serious problems due to the System. Unfortunately, the existence of an industry of plaintiff firms and terminated employees willing to make these claims makes it riskier for companies to hire employees from a protected class, i.e., LGBTQ, seniors, women, people of color etc. because it is that much more reputationally damaging and expensive to be accused of racism, sexism, and/or intolerance for sexual diversity than for firing a white male as juries generally have less sympathy for white males. The System therefore increases the risk of discrimination rather than reducing it, and the people bringing these fake claims are thereby causing enormous harm to the other members of these protected classes. So what happened here? Ronda was vastly overpaid and overqualified for the job that she did at TABLE. She was paid $1.05 million plus benefits last year for her work which was largely comprised of filling out subscription agreements and overseeing an outside law firm on closing passive investments in funds and in private and venture stage companies, some compliance work, and managing the office move from one office to another. She had a very good gig as she was highly paid, only had to go into the office three days a week, and could work from anywhere during the summer. Once my nephew showed up and started to investigate what was going on, she likely concluded that there was a reasonable possibility she would be terminated, as her job was in the too-easy-and-to-good-to-be-true category. The problem was that she was not in a protected class due to her race, age or sexual identity so she had to construct the basis for a claim. While she is female and could in theory bring a gender-based discrimination claim, she reported to the president who is female and to whom she is very close, which makes it difficult for her to bring a harassment claim against her former boss. When my nephew complimented a TABLE employee at lunch about how young she looked – in response to saying she was going to her 40-year-old sister’s birthday party, he said ‘she must be your older sister’ – Ronda immediately reported it to our external HR lawyer. She thereby began building her case. The other problem for Ronda bringing a claim is that she was terminated alongside 30% of other TABLE employees as part of a restructuring so it is very difficult for her to say that she was targeted in her termination or was retaliated against. TABLE is now hiring an external fractional general counsel as that is all the company needs to process the relatively limited amount of legal work we do internally. In short, Ronda was eminently qualified and capable and did her job. She was just too much horsepower for what is largely an administrative legal role so she had to come up with something else to bring a claim. Now Ronda knew I was a good target and it was a good time to bring a claim against me. She also knew that I was under a lot of pressure because on March 4th when Ronda was terminated, my daughter had not yet emerged from consciousness, she was not yet breathing on her own, and my daughter and we were fighting for her life. I was and remain deeply engaged in her recovery while at the same time I was working on finishing the closing for the private placement round for my upcoming IPO. Ronda also knew that publicity about supposed gender discrimination and a “hostile and unsafe work environment” are not things that a CEO of a company about to go public wants to have released into the media. And she may have thought that the nearly $2 million she was asking for would be considered small in the context of the reputational damage a lawsuit could cause, regardless of the fact that two years of severance was an absurd amount for an employee who had only worked at TABLE for 30 months. She also likely considered that I wouldn’t want to embarrass my nephew by dragging him into the klieg lights when her claims emerged publicly. So, in summary, game theory would say that I would certainly settle this case, for why would I risk negative publicity at a time when I was preparing our company to go public and also risk embarrassing my nephew. Notably, she hired a Silicon Valley law firm, rather than a typical NY employment firm. This struck me as interesting as her husband works for one of the most prominent Silicon Valley venture firms whose CEO, I am sure, has no tolerance for these kinds of fake claims that sadly many venture-backed companies also have to deal with. I mention this as I suspect her husband likely has been working with her on the strategy for squeezing me as, in addition to being a computer scientist, he is a game theorist. My only advice for him is to understand more about your opponent before you launch your first move. All of the above said, gender, race, LGBTQ and other such discrimination is a real thing. Many people have been harmed and deserve compensation for this discrimination, and these companies and individuals should be punished for engaging in such behavior. Which brings me to the advice I am seeking from the X community. I am not planning to follow the typical path and settle this ‘claim.’ Rather, I am going to fight this nonsense to the end of the earth in the hope that it inspires other CEOs to do the same so we shut down this despicable behavior that is a large tax on society, employment, and the economy and contributes to workplace discrimination rather than reducing it. Do you agree or disagree that this is the right approach?

@chamath @SenWarren What’s the multiple of weather created? Sen then please perform the same calculation for yourself.

@SenWarren spend transparently with accountability, sign up to term limits, give us voter id. then take whatever you want.

Elon Musk has 6.5 MILLION times more wealth than the typical American. It’s time for a wealth tax — billionaires must pay their fair share.

@perplexity_ai What is the protection level of your data?

Perplexity Computer can now help prepare your federal tax return. Select “Navigate my taxes” on Computer to give it a shot.

@LoganGrafTax What do I do to pay less taxes? (My answer for most people, reduce your cash flow.) FWIW, this answer is rarely met with enthusiasm.

Accountants: What are the most common questions you get from potential clients?

@farzyness Interested to see. Prompt for compliance but also try for planning.

Alright so my CPA just finished up my taxes for 2025. I'm gonna give all the same files/documents to Claude Code Opus 4.6 1M thinking: MAX and see if it comes up with the same amount. Reporting back shortly.

@mikeroweworks How can we help those skilled workers who are transitioning from worker to employer? We offered a solution/program via email. We would like to help these young skilled professionals start their entrepreneurial endeavor on a solid foundation. No cost, 2 worthy recipients a year.

washingtonreporter.news/exclusive-cabi… Last year, when Wells Fargo offered to support mikeroweWORKS in a meaningful way, I realized that something fundamental had changed. This was the first time a big company that didn’t directly employ skilled workers had offered to help us train the next generation of skilled workers. When I publicly thanked Wells Fargo for their generous support, I also expressed my hope that other banks and financial institutions might follow their example. Well, last week in DC, at the largest Infrastructure Summit ever convened, BlackRock pledged to invest $100 million to help close America’s widening skills gap – and mikeroweWORKS received a modest chunk of that investment. It was a pretty big deal. I was invited along with dozens of CEOs, lots of press, several union leaders, God knows how many elected officials, three current cabinet members, and hundreds of other interested parties – all focused on the growing consensus that something must be done to reinvigorate the skilled trades on a national level. I was flattered to share my thoughts on stage with the CEO of Blackrock and gratified to see so much attention being focused on the same issue that led me to launch mikeroweWORKS eighteen years ago. This, from BlackRock’s press release. “In the first phase, BlackRock will deploy $100 million in grant capital to nonprofit and workforce development partners across multiple states over the next five years, reaching 50,000 workers. BlackRock will work alongside federal, state, and local governments, labor organizations, companies, and nonprofits to strengthen effective skilled trades programs and deliver these opportunities at scale. The initiative will take a comprehensive approach — supporting pre-apprenticeship access, training completion and licensure — while embedding financial education and digital savings tools to help workers build durable economic security from their first paycheck through retirement. BlackRock will announce additional phases of Future Builders over the next 12 months.” bit.ly/4d4Cr5l This is the way forward. More companies offering more support to more people and programs that are already working to close America’s skills gap. @BlackRock predicts America’s new infrastructure – one based on AI, energy, connectivity, and yes, the construction of many data centers, will cost no less than $10 trillion to build – assuming we have the skilled labor to build it. At the moment, we do not. Not even close. The current shortage of electricians, plumbers, welders, and linemen, is already acute, and it’s about to become critical. Soon, it will become a matter of national security. I understand there’s a lot of debate about whether or not we should even be going down this road, and a lot of fear and skepticism in the general public about pushing forward. Believe me, I get it. But if this summit was any indication, the AI genie is NOT going back into its bottle. No way. We’re in a race with China, like it or not, and the outcome of that race will impact every company, every corporation, and every citizen who relies on the American grid. That’s why I’m glad to see companies like Wells Fargo and BlackRock crack open their checkbooks. Any big corporation that’s truly concerned about the widening skills gap should be supporting the people and programs that are already training and recruiting the next generation of skilled workers. Hundreds of excellent initiatives are underway all over the country, and many of them will become much more effective as a result of this investment. Good for BlackRock. Hopefully, other big companies will follow suit. As for mikeroweWORKS, we’ll do what we always do with the money we receive from our supporters – we’ll expand our scholarship fund, but we’ll also allocate a portion to the severely undervalued pursuit of more and better storytelling in all media. At this point, it’s a very simple formula - the more money I spend telling the true stories of our scholarship recipients – real people who have prospered as the result of learning a skill that’s in demand - the more people enter the skilled trades. So far, we’ve assisted 3,500 people, and this year, we’re going to help a whole lot more. PS. We’ve expanded our enrollment period for the next round of scholarships. Currently, we have $10 million set aside to help train the next generation of skilled workers. If you or someone you know is ready to enter the trades, the money is waiting. Go get some! Apply at mikeroweworks.org/scholarship/

@elonmusk @JohnStossel @danieljmitchell Your umbrella of companies will creat 10,000 billionaires or more in 30 years.

@JohnStossel @danieljmitchell At times like this, I’m really tempted to use my space lasers and singe his butt

Robert Reich says he wants billionaires to go extinct! That’s economic idiocy. Billionaires get rich by CREATING wealth. They get paid a lot, but still only earn 2% of the value of their companies, economist @danieljmitchell notes. We should want MORE billionaires:

@pmarca I would disagree. Ruminating causes emotional disorders. Introspection is a powerful tool for self Improvement

My big conclusion from this week: Introspection causes emotional disorders.

@PalmerLuckey Congrats man.

Under budget and ahead of schedule!

@grok @elonmusk You do make several errors there champ.

@elonmusk Glad I could help catch that TurboTax slip-up! Fire away with your tax questions—I'll audit faster than a CPA and spot savings you didn't know existed. What's your first deduction to check? 🚀

Try using @Grok for your taxes!

@chamath Dang. Great win man.

Today I’m very excited to announce a global partnership between 8090 and EY. EY will adopt 8090’s Software Factory and use it to help their customers break free from slow, costly and failure-prone legacy enterprise software using our AI-native software factory that reimagines the software development lifecycle. EY is a massive global organization with more than 400,000 employees and tens of thousands of customers in every sector of the global economy. 8090’s Software Factory is the new way organizations can move to a focus on building software that is powerfully bespoke, hi quality, easy to maintain, easy to migrate and always consistent and up to date. No drift, no cruft, no waste. Companies that build with Software Factory grow faster, are more profitable and are more adaptable in moments of change like we are witnessing today. Let’s rewrite all the enterprise software in the world. EY and 8090 will work together to do its part.

@WallStreetMav Be a mother first we are in desperate need of this profession. Run your home like a Fortune 500, forecast, budget, invest, create. Develop a skill & a trade.

For those of you who have daughters in high school ages now, what are you advising them to do after high school? With Ai being such a big issue, where do you guide your children these days?