Hello, and welcome to the It's 4.4.4 episode of Slate Money, your guide to the business

and finance news of the week. I'm Felix Salmon of Axios, Emily Peck of Axios is also here.

Hello. Along with Elizabeth Spires.

And we all know that we have Paul Newman to blame for the ridiculous surge in watch

prices. If we haven't talked about that, we can talk about that some other time. But yeah, it's

basically the Rolex collectibility thing is all Paul Newman's fault. But that is not the only

thing that is all Paul Newman's fault. There's something else, the little Paul Newman's fault.

Which we are going to talk about when we also talk about Patagonia being sold this week. That

is coming up along with discussions of the rail strike that wasn't and also the sale of

Figma to Adobe. And if you're a Slate Plus member, we answer your question of how do I work out

what to cook with all of this stuff. It's all coming up on Slate Money. Okay, so I really

want to talk about this Patagonia thing. Are you down for that? Let's do it. Let's do it. Okay, so

there are two dueling narratives going on in this story. There was the, oh my god, this is amazing.

Even Schroener has donated a multi-billion dollar company to climate charities and it's all

going to be owned by the planet now and isn't that awesome. Versus, oh my god, even Schroener has

taken advantage of a massive tax loophole to not pay any kind of gift tax, estate tax, capital gains

tax, or anything else and how rude of him. Can they both be true? Well, I think they can both

be true, but we need to back up and explain what happened. Patagonia is a three billion dollar

company. The founder has decided that he's effectively giving it away, so he's put 2% I think of

the shares in 501 C3, non-profit. And there's not a 501 C3, it's just a trust, I think. So he's

paying gift tax on that, but it's a tiny bit, it's like $17 million. Yeah, but most of it's going

into a C4, which is an organization that's allowed to make unlimited political donations. So he

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