Whatever the merits of the case, Walt would seem to have a novel defense for his tax avoidance:

He was going to use the money to change the world. To fight for arms control and human rights. To promote family planning and space exploration. He was going to give the money away, starting next year...

... Anderson was one of the driving forces behind MirCorp, which sought to privatize Russia's decrepit Mir space station and arranged for an American financier to take an excursion in space. MirCorp's ambitions were dashed with the station's demise.

But Anderson has remained passionate about space. "I want to build my own space station since we lost the Mir," he said. "I want to have a moon base."

It also has some interesting quotes from Jeff Manber and Bob Werb.

I believe him. Unfortunately, the government doesn't view that as a good reason to stash funds overseas.

It would be nice if we could get some philanthropy going in this area from some less flaky sources. One of the reasons that we've made so little progress is that the people with the money aren't interested in space, and the people interested in space haven't had the money, and when on the rare occasion you get someone with both, there's some other problem. I hope that the Paul Allens and Jeff Bezos' of the world will start to change that.

NASA Watch has links to this and related stories.

Hence the reason I'm focusing my short term efforts on making money (legally). See Refactored Networks for the current example.

That is taking up 90% of my time.The other 10% is spent helping out Masten Space Systems.

Would I much rather be doing nothing but space? Sure. But the only existing proofs for being able to do that seem to require making gobs of money somewhere else and then building it the way you want. Will I sell Refactored Networks for a few billion? I doubt it. But selling it for a hundred million or so would really help MSS.

-MM

Me too. I will probably start a foundation and advertise it, but I think it is better to spend time earning money to donate to it than soliciting donations. With so many rich boomers dying in the next 10-30 years, I could be wrong.