There is no exception here; in-kind compensation is taxable income whether it's a free meal on the job (the IRS has entire tables for how these are to be valued) for someone making $10 an hour or full-time use of a private jet for some fatcat. Mr Zuckerberg will have owed, and presumably paid, federal and state income taxes on it, the overwhelming majority of it at a total rate of approximately 52% (37% federal, 1.45% Medicare, 13.3% California provincial).
And if the company "grossed up" the amount, supplementing it with the cash required to pay the hefty tax bill on the non-cash comp, *that too* is taxable income, also at the same eye-watering rate. Assuming that was the case, it's likely that Mr Zuckerberg got the various non-cash comp and allowances and after paying his taxes got pretty much nothing else. I'm sure he's not hurting any -- he can borrow against his stock at trivially low rates of interest -- but the idea that he's somehow entitled to massive tax breaks on account of being rich needs to be justified. In fact it's on account of being rich that he or his company has to pay an extremely high tax rate. There are really very few tax breaks available on plain old current income; you can take advantage of tax shelters and lower rates on capital gains and NOL investments and all the other hundreds of little loopholes and exceptions only when you do something with the already-taxed money you have. Cash or in-kind, the comp described by this filing is going to have been fully taxable to either Mr Zuckerberg or his company.
If you want to be angry about something, ask yourself why the owners of the company put up with paying for all this stuff instead of handing him $1m a year and telling him to pay for his own security. Perhaps if he were forced to do so he would consider being less of a dick; the company's own filing says outright that this costs so much money because everyone hates him. Perhaps that should create an incentive for a bit of introspection.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
