• Tech employees share their salary negotiation tips, which helped boost their pay by tens of thousands of dollars.
• Their negotiation strategies include practicing pitches, using data, and leveraging multiple offers.
• Research and transparency are key in negotiating better compensation in tech roles, they said.

Sarra Bounouh has worked at consulting giant Accenture and three Big Tech companies.

But she still deals with imposter syndrome, especially when talking compensation.

"Going into a negotiation is always, at least for me, a very uncomfortable discussion," Bounouh told Business Insider. "I just want to push through and ask for what I deserve."

She and four other tech employees from Meta, Google, and Cisco shared their salary negotiation tips before joining a company or when trying to get promoted. They have used these strategies to add tens of thousands of dollars to their original offers in recent years.

Product manager at Meta

Avoid offering the first number. If you must, back it up with research, said Bounouh, a product manager who joined Meta earlier this year.

She suggested using resources like Levels.fyi or Glassdoor and selecting your role and geography to see recent offers and compensation that makes sense for that job.

"I personally don't like having detailed conversations about level and compensation from that first call with the recruiter because I want to meet the team, I want to meet the hiring manager, I want to get excited about the role," she said.

Bounouh prefers to negotiate her level and compensation once there's an offer on the table.

She said she often gets asked about salary expectations early in the process because recruiters say they want to save time for both sides.

She politely declines to share a number by telling the recruiter: "I don't have a number for your right now. I will need to do some research before getting back to you. At this stage of the process, I'm more focused on meeting the hiring manager and team."

Rehearsal is key for conversations about promotions or raises, she said.

Bounouh said she practiced her pitch for every job after Accenture and increased all three jobs' initial salary offers: Microsoft by 32%, Snap by 19%, and Meta by 37%.

Product manager at Oracle

Internal transfers between teams or offices are also an opportunity to negotiate your compensation package.

Ketaki Vaidya, who moved from Oracle's India to California office in 2022, said she approached her negotiation with an "everything under the sun is negotiable" mindset.

First, Vaidya looked at Glassdoor and talked to people who'd made the move to gather salary data. She wanted to ensure she was getting a fair offer for the US' cost of living.

"I was being given this offer for the credibility that I had built in the organization. I felt like I had an upper hand in negotiating," she said. "I was much more confident in asking for the things that I deserve — so it ended up being a very smooth transition."

After negotiating her base salary up to $80,000, she discussed other compensation components, including the timing of her next review, sign-on bonuses, relocation costs, paid leave, and remote work. She negotiated a sign-on bonus of $15,000 and a relocation allowance of $15,000, which weren't part of the initial offer.

Now, her compensation is about $130,000 annually, including stock units and bonuses.

Product manager at Cisco

When Varun Kulkarni switched from consulting to tech to work on more artificial intelligence projects, he was careful not to come off as aggressive during his pay negotiations.

Once he had offers from Cisco and others in hand in 2022, he was transparent with recruiters and mentioned other offers, without introducing his own counter number.

He asked recruiters how high they could go and what they thought about other offers.

"You want to kind of not be too pushy" he said.

His offer from Cisco already matched the market rate and what several competitors were offering, but he managed to negotiate it by 5%, bringing his total compensation to $180,000.

Product manager at Google

During his 2022 recruitment process at Google, Yung-Yu Lin used his employer at the time, PayPal, to land better offers from both companies.

He interviewed and landed jobs at several places — but their pay did not compare with Google's offer.

Lin decided to negotiate a retention package. PayPal countered with a 10% pay bump. He then renegotiated with Google.

Google offered a 20% raise on his original compensation at PayPal, which brought his offer to the $350,000 to $400,000 range as a senior product manager, including stock-based compensation.

Software engineer at Meta

Hemant Pandey, a senior software engineer at Meta, used other offers and research in his most recent job search.

After two years at Salesforce, in 2021 he applied to Meta, TikTok, LinkedIn, and two other companies. He used offers from these companies to negotiate his compensation at Meta.

"Be very transparent that you have other offers. Even if you have interviews going on, mention those, because it's also leverage," he said. It signals to the recruiter that they have to move fast and work with your parameters.

Meta's recruiters matched the base salary and restricted stock units from the highest of all offers.

Aside from being transparent, Pandey said it is important to be proactive and research how compensation works in different companies. For example, candidates should compare how stocks are refreshed, he said. A refresher is when the stock option portion of an employee's compensation is updated.

"I also negotiated my sign-on bonus and said, 'Hey, at Salesforce, I'll be leaving my $30,000 to $40,000 of annual bonus if I join you. Can you help me accommodate that?'"

Pandey was offered $520,000 in annual pay, including stock options, in that 2021 move.

"The most significant thing happened in my career when I made the move from Salesforce to Meta, which was close to almost 80 to 90% hike" in pay, Pandey said.

Do you work in tech, consulting, or finance and have a story to share about your career journey? Please reach out at [email protected].

• Oracle and xAI love to flex the size of their GPU clusters.
• It's getting hard to tell who has the most supercomputing power as more firms claim the top spot.
• The real numbers are competitive intel and cluster size isn't everything, experts told BI.

In high school, as in tech, superlatives are important. Or maybe they just feel important in the moment. With the breakneck pace of the AI computing infrastructure buildout, it's becoming increasingly difficult to keep track of who has the biggest, fastest, or most powerful supercomputer — especially when multiple companies claim the title at once.

"We delivered the world's largest and fastest AI supercomputer, scaling up to 65,000 Nvidia H200 GPUs," Oracle CEO Safra Catz and Chairman, CTO, echoed by Founder Larry Ellison on the company's Monday earnings call.

In late October, Nvidia proclaimed xAI's Colossus as the "World's Largest AI Supercomputer," after Elon Musk's firm reportedly built a computing cluster with 100,000 Nvidia graphics processing units in a matter of weeks. The plan is to expand to 1 million GPUs next, according to the Greater Memphis Chamber of Commerce (where the supercomputer is located.)

The good ole days of supercomputing are gone

It used to be simpler. "Supercomputers" were most commonly found in research settings. Naturally, there's an official list ranking supercomputers. Until recently the world's most powerful supercomputer was named El Capitan. Housed at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California 11 million CPUs and GPUs from Nvidia-rival AMD add up to 1.742 Exaflops of computing capacity. (One exaflop is equal to one quintillion, or a billion billions, operations per second.)

"The biggest computers don't get put on the list," Dylan Patel, chief analyst at Semianalysis, told BI. "Your competitor shouldn't know exactly what you have," he continued. The 65,000-GPU supercluster Oracle executives were praising can reach up to 65 exaflops, according to the company.

It's safe to assume, Patel said, that Nvidia's largest customers, Meta, Microsoft, and xAI also have the largest, most powerful clusters. Nvidia CFO Colette Cress said 200 fresh exaflops of Nvidia computing would be online by the end of this year — across nine different supercomputers — on Nvidia's May earnings call.

Going forward, it's going to be harder to determine whose clusters are the biggest at any given moment — and even harder to tell whose are the most powerful — no matter how much CEOs may brag.

It's not the size of the cluster — it's how you use it

On Monday's call, Ellison was asked, if the size of these gigantic clusters is actually generating better model performance.

He said larger clusters and faster GPUs are elements that speed up model training. Another is networking it all together. "So the GPU clusters aren't sitting there waiting for the data," Ellison said Monday.

Thus, the number of GPUs in a cluster isn't the only factor in the computing power calculation. Networking and programming are important too. "Exaflops" are a result of the whole package so unless companies provide them, experts can only estimate.

What's certain is that more advanced models — the kind that consider their own thinking and check their work before answering queries — require more compute than their relatives of earlier generations. So training increasingly impressive models may indeed require an arms race of sorts.

But an enormous AI arsenal doesn't automatically lead to better or more useful tools.

Sri Ambati, CEO of open-source AI platform H2O.ai, said cloud providers may want to flex their cluster size for sales reasons, but given some (albeit slow) diversification of AI hardware and the rise of smaller, more efficient models, cluster size isn't the end all be all.

Power efficiency too, is a hugely important indicator for AI computing since energy is an enormous operational expense in AI. But it gets lost in the measuring contest.

Nvidia declined to comment. Oracle did not respond to a request for comment in time for publication.

Have a tip or an insight to share? Contact Emma at [email protected] or use the secure messaging app Signal: 443-333-9088.

• Companies will soon focus on customizing AI solutions for specific needs, Cohere's CEO says.
• AI 2.0 will "help fundamentally transform how businesses operate," he wrote.
• Major AI companies like OpenAI are also releasing tools for customization.

If this was the year companies adopted AI to stay competitive, next year will likely be about customizing AI solutions for their specific needs.

"The next phase of development will move beyond generic LLMs towards tuned and highly optimized end-to-end solutions that address the specific objectives of a business," Aidan Gomez, the CEO and cofounder of Cohere, an AI company building technology for enterprises, wrote in a post on LinkedIn last week.

"AI 2.0," as he calls it, will "accelerate adoption, value creation, and will help fundamentally transform how businesses operate." He added: "Every company will be an AI company."

Cohere has partnered with major companies, including software company Oracle and IT company Fujitsu, to develop customized business solutions.

"With Oracle, we've built customized technology and tailored our AI models to power dozens (soon, hundreds) of production AI features across Netsuite and Fusion Apps," he wrote. For Fujitsu, Cohere built a model called Takane that's "specifically designed to excel in Japanese."

Last June, Cohere partnered with global management consulting firm McKinsey & Company to develop customized generative AI solutions for the firm's clients. The work is helping the startup "build trust" among more organizations, Gomez previously told Business Insider.

To meet the specific needs of so many clients, Gomez has advocated for smaller, more efficient AI models. He says they are more cost-effective than building large language models, and they give smaller startups a chance to compete with more established AI companies.

But it might be only a matter of time before the biggest companies capitalize on the customization trend, too.

OpenAI previewed an advancement during its "Shipmas" campaign that allows users to fine-tune o1 — their latest and most advanced AI model, on their own datasets. So, users can now leverage OpenAI's reinforcement-learning algorithms to customize their own models.

The technology will be available to the public next year, but OpenAI has already partnered with companies like Thomson Reuters to develop specialized legal tools and researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory to build computational models for identifying genetic diseases.

Cohere did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.

• The US Appeals Court upheld a decision forcing the sale of TikTok lest it be banned in the US.
• Several investors, philanthropists, and tech giants are interested in buying the company.
• Here's what they've said they'd do with the short-form video platform if they bought it.

On Friday, a panel of three judges from the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit upheld a law that will ban TikTok from app stores in the United States if the social media platform's parent company, the China-based ByteDance, doesn't sell its stake in the app by January 19.

In a statement about the decision, TikTok said it would appeal the decision to the Supreme Court on First Amendment grounds.

"Unfortunately, the TikTok ban was conceived and pushed through based upon inaccurate, flawed, and hypothetical information, resulting in outright censorship of the American people," TikTok's statement read. "The TikTok ban, unless stopped, will silence the voices of over 170 million Americans here in the US and around the world on January 19th, 2025."

With the app's uncertain future in the United States, a slate of ultrawealthy investors has expressed interest in buying the social media platform.

Big-name buyers, from Kevin O'Leary of "Shark Tank" to former Dodgers owner Frank McCourt, have said for months that they are prepared to step in if ByteDance changes its mind or the Supreme Court decides the ban can proceed.

Here's what those who've said publicly that they want to buy TikTok would do with the platform if they acquired the app.

Representatives for TikTok did not respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.

Kevin O'Leary

In March, the "Shark Tank" mogul told CNBC he wanted to assemble a syndicate of investors to purchase the platform for about $20 to $30 billion — a fraction of its $220 billion valuation in its last funding round.

"It's the largest entertainment and business network in America as it stands today, so it's of great interest and great value," he told the outlet.

However, O'Leary said a sale likely wouldn't include TikTok's signature algorithms, so he or another purchaser would have to "re-emulate" the app's algorithms and act as a "steward" to transform the platform from "TikTok China to TikTok U.S.A."

It's unclear exactly how O'Leary might change TikTok's algorithms; however, similar short-form video services exist elsewhere on social media with their own proprietary algorithms, and he said a new version could be created under the existing TikTok brand.

Representatives for O'Leary did not respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.

Steven Mnuchin

The former treasury secretary in March said he was putting together an investor group to try to purchase TikTok, CNBC reported.

Mnuchin didn't specify any other potential investors involved in the bid or the dollar amount they planned to offer for the social media site. In a May interview with Bloomberg Television, he said he'd replicate the app's signature algorithm to continue the service.

"My plan, if we were to purchase, it would be to rebuild the technology under US leadership, make sure that it's all disconnected from ByteDance going forward, and that it is very robust and secure," Mnuchin said.

Representatives for Mnuchin did not respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.

Bobby Kotick

The Wall Street Journal reported in March that the former chief executive of Activision was considering bidding for TikTok. The outlet reported the exact amount of his proposal was unspecified but would likely be in the hundreds of billions of dollars.

The Journal reported Kotick approached OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and other possible investors during a dinner at an Allen & Co. conference, discussing a potential deal that could allow OpenAI to train its artificial intelligence models on the data gathered from the app.

A spokesperson for Kotick told Business Insider, "Mr. Kotick has always believed a comprehensive reciprocal trade framework is preferable to singling out an individual company, and he still does."

Frank McCourt

The former Dodgers owner and former CEO of McCourt Global has turned democratizing and improving the internet into a major philanthropic focus through his Project Liberty project. The company announced in March that McCourt had put together a bid to purchase TikTok.

McCourt, during a December 8 appearance on CBS News, said he had "circled over $20 billion" for the potential sale.

"We're very serious about raising whatever capital is required to buy the platform and to be clear, we're looking to move the 170 million users over to a new protocol where the individuals will own and control their identity and their data," McCourt said. "We're not looking to replicate the existing version."

The billionaire businessman has titled his TikTok purchase project "The People's Bid." He has secured the backing of Guggenheim Securities, an investment banking firm, and Kirkland & Ellis, one of the world's largest law firms.

McCourt told CBS that the People's Bid aims to protect user privacy and move users to "a new stack where you can't harvest without permission, so individuals will own and control their identity and their data" to promote an internet service that respects its users "as opposed to exploits them."

A spokesperson for McCourt directed Business Insider to a public statement by the billionaire following the Appeals Court decision upholding the law which could force the sale of the app.

"Now that the Court has spoken, The People's Bid is prepared to move forward with our bid for TikTok," McCourt's statement reads. "We are going to rebuild TikTok and prove that it's possible to enjoy the internet without sacrificing our privacy and safety."

Other possible investors

Other big names have previously shown interest in buying TikTok, including Microsoft, which in 2020 tried and failed to acquire the platform when, during his first administration in August 2020, President Donald Trump, citing concerns about ByteDance's ties to Beijing, issued executive orders forcing ByteDance to sell its TikTok US operations to an American company.

Walmart and the software company Oracle also assembled a bid to buy TikTok in 2020, but TikTok ultimately defeated Trump's orders in court and the acquisition plans did not materialize.

The companies have not publicly said whether they would make another offer now. Walmart, Oracle, and Microsoft representatives did not immediately respond to requests for comment from Business Insider sent over the weekend.

• Larry Ellison plans to invest up to $165 million into research at the University of Oxford.
• The investment aims to transform research into products, focusing on key global challenges.
• The Ellison Institute of Technology is opening a campus in Oxford in 2027.

Larry Ellison is betting big on research and development in the UK by investing at least $127 million through his technology institute to help turn scientific discoveries at the University of Oxford into products.

The Ellison Institute of Technology, set up by the Oracle cofounder in 2015, plans to invest £130 million ($165 million) overall to fund joint research projects at the university in areas ranging from health to clean energy.

Ellison said in a press release that the joint venture's mission is to "have a global impact by fundamentally reimagining the way science and technology translate into end-to-end solutions for humanity's most challenging problems."

"This long-term, strategic partnership with the University of Oxford is at the heart of delivering on that goal," he added. "By collaborating on transformational, world-class research programs harnessing new technology and compute capability we will together deliver positive impact on society at scale."

The Oracle cofounder, now the world's fourth richest person, founded The Ellison Institute of Technology as a research and development center for healthcare.

The center announced plans to build a campus in Oxford in 2023, which is set to open in 2027. The $1.27 billion development will include labs, supercomputing facilities, and cancer research clinics.

The EIT will inject millions into joint research projects with the University of Oxford to dedicate to what Professor Irene Tracey, the university's vice-chancellor, described in a press release as "humanity's most pressing challenges."

The joint center's research will focus on EIT's four "Humane Endeavours": health and medical science, sustainable agriculture, clean energy, and government innovation in the age of AI.

Professor Sir John Bell, the president of EIT Oxford, said in a statement that the alliance "comes at an exciting time in the technological revolution."

"By combining world-class research with long-term capital investment and state-of-the-art facilities, we will tackle some of society's biggest challenges," he said. "Whether it's advancing new approaches for healthcare or solving the issues of food security, we will make progress using the brightest and most creative human minds available."

Bell told the FT the investment would also help secure the intellectual property rights of innovations that come out of the center and its researchers — something the science minister, Lord Patrick Vallance, told the outlet the UK had been falling behind on.

The deal also includes £30 million ($38 million) to provide scholarships to more than 100 undergraduate and postgraduate students, with the first intake starting in October 2025.

Ellison owns 40% of the business software company Oracle, and his net worth has more than doubled over the past two years to $181 billion.

He is in the process of purchasing Paramount for his son, David.

• Oracle shares are set for their best year since 1999 after a 75% surge.
• The enterprise-computing stock has benefited from strong demand for cloud and AI infrastructure.
• Oracle cofounder Larry Ellison's personal fortune has surged .

Oracle has surged 75% since January, putting the stock on track for its best year since a tripling in 1999 during the dot-com boom.

The enterprise-computing giant's share price has jumped from a low of about $60 in late 2022 to about $180, boosting Oracle's market value from below $165 billion to north of $500 billion.

It's now worth almost as much as Exxon Mobil ($518 billion), and more valuable than Mastercard ($489 billion), Costco ($431 billion), or Netflix ($379 billion).

Oracle's soaring stock price has boosted the net worth of Larry Ellison, who cofounded the company and is chief technology officer. His holding of more than 40% puts him second on the Forbes Real-Time Billionaires list worth $227 billion, second only to Tesla CEO Elon Musk's $330 billion.

Oracle provides all manner of software and hardware for businesses, but its cloud applications and infrastructure are fueling its growth as companies such as Tesla that are training large language models pay up for processing power.

The company was founded in 1977 but is still growing at a good clip. Net income jumped by 23% to $10.5 billion in the year ended May, fueled by 12% sales growth in the cloud services and license support division, which generated nearly 75% of its revenues.

Oracle signed the largest sales contracts in its history last year as it tapped into "enormous demand" for training LLMs, CEO Safra Catz said in the fourth-quarter earnings release. She said the client list included OpenAI and its flagship ChatGPT model, which kickstarted the AI boom.

Catz also predicted revenue growth would accelerate from 6% to double digits this financial year. That's partly because Oracle is working with Microsoft and Google to interconnect their respective clouds, which Ellison said would help to "turbocharge our cloud database growth."

Oracle has flown under the radar this year compared to Nvidia. The chipmaker's stock has tripled in the past year and it now rivals Apple as the world's most valuable company. Yet Oracle is still headed for its best annual stock performance in a quarter of a century — and its bosses are promising there's more to come.

• The world's 10 biggest wealth gainers have grown $790 billion richer in 2024.
• Elon Musk leads the list with a $257 billion gain that has boosted his net worth to $486 billion.
• Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison, and Jensen Huang are all up more than $70 billion.

Ten people have grown their personal fortunes by a combined $790 billion this year — a figure larger than the market value of Walmart ($767 billion).

The biggest wealth gainers of 2024 include Tesla CEO Elon Musk, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Amazon chairman Jeff Bezos, Oracle chairman Larry Ellison, and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.

The buzz around artificial intelligence, a solid outlook for the US economy, and market expectations about Donald Trump's second term in office have boosted their companies' stock prices, benefiting them as major shareholders.

Here are the 10 greatest wealth builders this year as of the market close on Tuesday, December 17.

1. Elon Musk

Year-to-date wealth gain: $257 billion

Net worth: $486 billion

Source of wealth gain: Tesla and SpaceX stock

Elon Musk is the CEO of automaker Tesla and spacecraft manufacturer SpaceX. He's also the owner of X, the social network previously known as Twitter, along with Neuralink, xAI, and The Boring Company.

Musk's $257 billion wealth gain this year exceeds the total net worth of Jeff Bezos, the second-richest person on the planet. The serial entrepreneur could soon become the first individual to amass a $500 billion fortune.

2. Mark Zuckerberg

Year-to-date wealth gain: $90.9 billion

Net worth: $219 billion

Source of wealth gain: Meta stock

Mark Zuckerberg is the cofounder and CEO of Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Threads.

Meta stock has soared 75% this year as investors wager Zuckerberg's big bets on AI and the metaverse will pay off in the years ahead. Zuckerberg has added about $90 billion to his net worth as a result, propelling him into third place on Bloomberg's rich list.

3. Jeff Bezos

Year-to-date wealth gain: $72.9 billion

Net worth: $250 billion

Source of wealth gain: Amazon stock

Jeff Bezos is Amazon's founder, executive chairman, and former CEO.

Amazon shares have leaped 52% this year as investors bet the online retailer can harness AI to supercharge its sales and leverage Amazon Web Services to become a key provider of cloud infrastructure to AI companies.

4. Larry Ellison

Year-to-date wealth gain: $70.4 billion

Net worth: $193 billion

Source of wealth gain: Oracle and Tesla stock

Larry Ellison is the cofounder, executive chairman, and chief technology officer of Oracle, one of the largest enterprise software companies.

Oracle stock has jumped 61% this year as the company has emerged as a key provider of cloud data centers for AI businesses, fueling a $70 billion increase in Ellison's net worth.

Ellison purchased more than 1.5% of Tesla prior to joining its board in December 2018, making him the electric-vehicle maker's second-largest individual shareholder after Musk. He's believed to have retained his stake, now worth upward of $20 billion, since resigning as a director in 2022.

5. Jensen Huang

Year-to-date wealth gain: $70 billion

Net worth: $114 billion

Source of wealth gain: Nvidia stock

Jensen Huang is the founder and CEO of Nvidia, the graphics chip maker that has emerged as a critical seller of "picks and shovels" to the AI gold rush.

Nvidia's stock has surged 163% this year, making it one of the world's most valuable companies with a $3.2 trillion market value and lifting Huang's net worth by $70 billion.

6. Michael Dell

Year-to-date wealth gain: $48.9 billion

Net worth: $127 billion

Source of wealth gain: Dell Technologies stock

Michael Dell is the founder and CEO of Dell Technologies, the maker of PCs, printers, and other computing equipment.

Dell shares have soared 55% this year as the company has shifted its focus toward AI-powered devices and servers.

7. Larry Page

Year-to-date wealth gain: $47.4 billion

Net worth: $174 billion

Source of wealth gain: Alphabet stock

Larry Page cofounded Google in 1998 and was the company's CEO until 2001 and again between 2011 and 2015 after Google was restructured as a subsidiary of Alphabet.

Alphabet shares have surged 40% this year as investors wager the search-and-advertising titan can dominate AI. The stock jump has fueled a $47 billion rise in Page's net worth.

8. Jim Walton

Year-to-date wealth gain: $45.1 billion

Net worth: $118 billion

Source of wealth gain: Walmart stock

Jim Walton is the youngest son of Walmart founder Sam Walton and, like his siblings, one of the retailer's largest shareholders with an 11%-plus stake.

Walmart stock has climbed 82% this year, fueled by resilient consumer spending in the face of historic inflation and soaring interest rates in recent years. The surge led to Walton amassing a $100 billion fortune for the first time in September.

9. Alice Walton

Year-to-date wealth gain: $44.4 billion

Net worth: $114 billion

Source of wealth gain: Walmart stock

Alice Walton is the only daughter of Walmart founder Sam Walton.

She overtook L'Oréal heiress Françoise Bettencourt Meyers in August to become the world's richest woman.

10. Rob Walton

Year-to-date wealth gain: $43.8 billion

Net worth: $115 billion

Source of wealth gain: Walmart stock

Rob Walton is the eldest son of Sam Walton and an heir to the Walmart fortune.

He and his siblings owe a big chunk of their wealth to their father, who handed them each a 20% stake in the family business over 70 years ago instead of having them inherit his fortune upon his death, in turn avoiding paying billions of dollars in estate taxes.