Facebook billionaire renounces U.S. citizenship, avoids tax liablity

Facebook is poised for an epic IPO. Anyone who happens to own even the smallest piece of the company is about to get ridiculously rich. And good for them because Facebook is a remarkable thing.

Becoming ridiculously rich maybe isn't good enough for co-founder Eduardo Saverin, according to Bloomberg. Saverin renounced his U.S. citizenship in advance of the Facebook IPO, possibly in an effort to lower his tax liability. Saverin claims he quit on America because tax rules are too complicated, but it's hard to ignore the potential tax savings with the IPO on the horizon.

Facebook plans to raise as much as $11.8 billion through the IPO, the biggest in history for an Internet company. Saverin’s stake is about 4 percent, according to the website whoownsfacebook.com. At the high end of the proposed IPO market capitalization, that would be worth about $3.84 billion.

If Saverin's name sounds vaguely familiar, he was Mark Zuckerberg's college friend portrayed in The Social Network. We were all supposed to feel bad for him because he had a falling out with Zuckerberg and ended up suing Facebook after being forced out of the company.

It's kind of hard to still consider Saverin as a sympathetic figure after this stunt. Maybe Justin Timberlake was right about this chotch all along. I mean, say what you will about Zuckerberg, but at least he's paying his taxes. -- JTW