The Thursday Lowdown ⬇️

If you're new around here, every day I share the 4-5 best accounting insights I saw in the past 24 hours.

I scroll. so you don't have to.

💎 WTF of the Day

Tesla’s Quiet CFO Just Made $139 Million

While Musk fights for his 56B bonus, Tesla’s CFO Vaibhav Taneja just quietly banked 139.5M in 2024, the most any CFO has ever made.

His base pay? Just 400K. The rest came from stock options that skyrocketed as Tesla’s stock jumped from 250 to 340. Now he’s outranking the likes of Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and Alphabet (Google) CEO Sundar Pichai combined

Not bad for a guy who started his career as an accountant in India.

Source: American Bazaar

💎 What’s poppin in accounting

IRS Help Team Gutted as 400 Workers Leave

The IRS’s Taxpayer Advocate Service, the team that steps in when your tax mess hits a wall, just lost 400 workers. That’s a quarter of its staff. Now the remaining team is stretched thin, with some agents juggling up to 200 cases at once.

The group is supposed to help regular people navigate complex tax problems, but with this kind of staffing crisis, delays and backlogs are likely to get worse.

Source: Bloomberg Tax

 📊 Weekly Trend Chart

Americans Are Seeking More Help With Adulting

Changing a tire. Using a hammer. Filing your taxes. Stuff people used to just know is now getting searched on Google like it’s rocket science. As practical skills vanish from schools and homes, the internet has become the go-to teacher. Search data shows record spikes in how-tos for cleaning, finances, and basic home tasks.

YouTube channels like “Dad, how do I?” and AI tools like ChatGPT are picking up where parents and school left off. Turns out, when nobody teaches you how to adult, you ask the algorithm.

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