How the rich make money by losing money

Decades ago, the richest Americans paid taxes as high as forty percent on their investment gains. Today, some millionaires and billionaires are using a tax loophole so powerful it could allow them to slash their tax bills to zero. Bloomberg reporter Lukia Giftipulu recently investigated what she and her colleagues call "this generation's great American tax dodge" — and at the center of it is a hot-tempered, computer-screen-punching financial whiz named Cliff Asness.

The mad genius behind the strategy

Cliff Asness is 59 years old, bald, with a gray beard and a Captain America tattoo on his arm. He worked at Goldman Sachs in the 1990s and also earned a PhD in finance. As Giftipulu describes him, he's a "mad genius" who has "found his way to help rich people slash their tax bills potentially to the extreme." People who have spent time with him consider him one of the smartest people they've ever met — but he also has a "massively short fuse." He shouts at people, and during the financial crisis he was punching through computer screens. He's known for publicly insulting fellow finance figures like billionaire Bill Ackman, and he's written Wall Street Journal op-eds defending what he calls the "Working Rich" — jokingly suggesting even Ebenezer Scrooge would qualify.