One of Facebook’s co-founders has defriended the United States.
Eduardo Saverin has decided to forgo his U.S. citizenship ahead of the company’s multibillion-dollar public offering next week, according to IRS records posted online.
Saverin will become a citizen of Singapore, where he has lived for the last three years.
Facebook’s IPO will send an estimated $3.8 billion into Saverin’s pockets, Bloomberg News reports.
Giving up U.S. citizenship will save Saverin a fortune in taxes, since Singapore doesn’t have a capital-gains tax.
Still, the 30-year-old billionaire won’t be off the hook entirely. Singapore taxes some foreign-sourced income, and Saverin will also be slapped with an “exit tax” by the U.S. on his shares, whether or not he sells them.
Saverin helped Mark Zuckerberg launch Facebook in 2004 at Harvard, and was named the company’s chief financial officer. The two friends had a fallingout as the startup became a worldwide success. Saverin was eventually frozen out and left with only about 4% of the company, according to various reports.
Saverin, born in Brazil, became a U.S. citizen in 1998. He has been living for the last three years in Singapore, where he drives a Bentley, owns a penthouse and rubs elbows with the rich and famous, The Wall Street Journal reports.
“Eduardo recently found it more practical to become a resident of Singapore since he plans to live there for an indefinite period of time,” a spokesman for Saverin told Bloomberg News.
The spokesman said he made the decision late last year.
Saverin’s name appeared on a quarterly IRS report published April 30 by the U.S. Office of the Federal Register listing all the Americans who have renounced citizenship.
The ousted CFO won the right to be acknowledged as a co-founder in a 2009 lawsuit filed against Zuckerberg, the terms of which were not disclosed.
The pairs friendship and fallout was immortalized in “ The Social Network,” which tells the story of Facebook’s rise to fame.
Facebook’s IPO on May 18 is valued at as high as $96 billion, the largest for any Internet company in history.
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