Jozef Imrich, name worthy of Kafka, has his finger on the pulse of any irony of interest and shares his findings to keep you in-the-know with the savviest trend setters and infomaniacs.
''I want to stay as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can't see from the center.''
-Kurt Vonnegut
Bruce Baird was a very egalitarian Member of Parliament graceful around librarians, attendants and waiters. Bruce was a regular swimmer on level 2 at the NSW Parliamentary swimming pool in winter and Andrew Boy Charlton pool in summer. He became a feature at Manly’s Bold and Beautiful ocean swimming club. To boot, Malcolm Turnbull groomed Bruce for several winter swims at Bondi Iceberg.
My daughters were christened at St Mark Darling Point church where Bruce shared several sermons in 1990s. He always had time to stay for morning tea and share a joke or ten with fellow worshippers and the ring leader of the bell ringers, Peter Coleman
Whenever, NSW Parliamentary Public Accounts Committee invited Bruce to speak at seminars, round table and conferences on Olympic Games and Public Private infrastructure projects, Bruce never declined. Even veteran independent politician, John Hatton AO, respects both Bruce and his son Mike who is involved with many charities …
Bruce Baird was a regular swimmer at the Bold and the Beautiful swim squad, which swims between Manly Beach and Shelly Beach. James Brickwood
Baird is the father of former NSW Premier Mike Baird, who led the state from 2014 to 2017, and journalist Julia Baird.
He played a key role in securing the Sydney 2000 Olympic Games while on Macquarie Street, where he headed the ministries for tourism, roads, environment and transport.
Bruce Baird has died aged 84. JAMES ALCOCK
Baird was elected to the now-abolished NSW seat of Northcott in 1984, which he held for 11 years, before entering federal parliament through the southern Sydney seat of Cook in 1998.
He represented the electorate for nine years, retiring before the 2007 election and making way for future prime minister Scott Morrison to occupy the seat.
Baird swam in the “Bold & Beautiful” swim squad, which regularly exercised in the waters off Manly and Shelly Beach. He was described as a “much-loved” member of the community by squad organiser Peter Anthony, and a “great mate” to those in the group.
“Bruce was a much-loved part of our swim community and a wonderful friend to so many of us,” Anthony told members on Friday. “Our thoughts are with his family and everyone who loved him.”
Former Liberal Party politician Bruce Baird has died aged 84.
Baird was father to former NSW premier Mike Baird, journalist Julia Baird and marketing executive Steve Baird. He was married to Judy, who predeceased him.
Baird was elected to the NSW parliament as the member for Northcott in 1984, and went on to serve as Transport Minister in the Greiner government. He was also responsible for Sydney’s successful bid to host the 2000 Olympics.
From 1984 to 1995, he was a member for the safe oLiberal seat of Northcott in NSW, during which time he served as minister for transport, minister for Sydney’s Olympics bid, and minister for tourism and roads.
In 1998, Baird crossed over to federal parliament after winning the electorate of Cook. A footnote in Liberal Party history is how Baird was overlooked for a ministry position in the John Howard government because of his stance on asylum seekers, which went against Howard’s policy, and his closeness to Howard’s treasurer and nemesis, Peter Costello.
Despite this, Baird was a leading moderate voice in the Howard government who was widely respected within the Coalition and across the aisle. He retired in 2007 and was ultimately replaced in the seat by Scott Morrison.
After politics he led the Tourism and Transport Forum and was chair of the Refugee Resettlement Advisory Council, which advised the federal government on refugee policy.
He was awarded a Member of the Order of Australia for service to Australian parliament in 2010, and for service to the community of NSW through a range of business, tourism and welfare organisations.
Baird, left, with NSW premier Nick Greiner in 1992.
Baird swam regularly as part of the Bold &Beautiful Swim Squad off Manly and Shelly Beaches. He was described as a much-loved member of the group by squad organiser Peter Anthony.
“Bruce was a much-loved part of our swim community and a wonderful friend to so many of us,” Anthony wrote to members on Friday afternoon. “Our thoughts are with his family and everyone who loved him.
“RIP mate. You will always be alongside me around the point.”
Australia Institute research shows voters across the political spectrum overwhelmingly support a 25% tax on gas exports, which could raise an estimated $17 billion in revenue each year. Yet the Australian Parliament has failed to act.
News Corp racked up its 12th year in a row of paying precisely zero tax in Australia, despite posting revenue well over $1 billion, new ATO data on Thursday revealed. Much of this revenue comes from REA Group, a company that benefits off a growing housing market.
No wonder the company’s editorial coverage has been so against Labor’s tax changes this year, which are squarely aimed at bringing down house prices.
Netflix paid a grand total of $8.4 million on $1.4 billion in local revenue, while TikTok Australia paid $17.3 million on $686.6 million in revenue. The good-bad-and-grumpy
Meta is exploiting a lucrative tax break intended to support research and experimentation. Its own accountants say the gambit is risky.
Mark Zuckerberg says Meta’s A.I. push is a tremendous success. “Our investments in A.I. are accelerating every major part of our core business,” he has toldinvestors. “Every sign that we’re seeing in our own work and across the industry gives us confidence in this investment.”
But when Meta files its taxes, it tells the Internal Revenue Service a different story. It claims that its A.I. data centers are a giant experiment that could fail, according to four people with knowledge of the company’s operations.
It does this so it can tap into a tax credit intended for research and experimentation. It’s an aggressive interpretation of the tax break, which Meta embraced to claim billions of dollars in tax credits for data center expansion.
Characterizing its A.I. data centers as experimental is “kind of wild and out there,” said Andre Shevchuck, a partner at the advisory firm BPM who specializes in the research and experimentation tax credit.
Indeed, Meta’s own accountants recognize that the strategy is on shaky legal ground. In disclosures buried in securities filings, the tech giant warns that billions in tax savings are vulnerable to being overturned by the I.R.S., in large part because of “uncertainties with our research tax credits.”
Here’s what Meta is doing: For tax purposes, the company classifies its enormous, multibillion-dollar data centers as “pilot models.” Under a tax credit created in the 1980s to spur innovation, companies can get a rebate for supplies, but only if they are being tested in an experimental effort, not standard business operations. Meta is claiming that the costly A.I. computer chips it buys from companies, including Nvidia, are entitled to a taxpayer-provided discount as part of the experiment.
The move caused some unease within Meta’s finance department. The I.R.S. in the past has challenged companies that claimed the credit for basic supplies. While thousands of companies, including other tech giants, get huge benefits from the research tax credit, they do so overwhelmingly for salaries paid to researchers and engineers — the people carrying out innovation.
How Meta’s research tax credits have exploded in recent years
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Meta’s use of the tax break for the data centers has not been previously reported. The New York Times reviewed securities filings and conducted multiple interviews, including with the people familiar with Meta’s operations, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss proprietary matters.
The company started claiming the credit for the data centers two years ago. Since then, Meta’s savings from the credit have soared, trimming almost $4 billion off its tax bill last year, filings show. Meta is now the biggest beneficiary of the tax credit among publicly traded companies, a Times review of securities filings found.
Aggressive bets like these often pan out for big companies: Even if the I.R.S. balks, companies can settle disputes and still wind up ahead.
Meta is already in one sizable dispute with the I.R.S. over this tax break, for using it to subsidize its chief executive’s multibillion-dollar pay package. In 2013, Meta claimed that $4.1 billion of stock options exercised by Mr. Zuckerberg counted as a research expense because he helped invent new software, such as Facebook’s News Feed. The I.R.S. is trying to claw back the company’s resulting $355 million in tax savings, court filings show.
The social media company’s stock is soaring, and it is now worth nearly $2 trillion thanks in part to how its A.I. efforts have improved Instagram, WhatsApp and Facebook. This month, Meta released Muse, a personal A.I. agent that immediately became the most downloaded app for iPhone and Android users. Meta and other tech giants’ A.I. efforts have also been helped by an accelerated write-off for research and development expenses that stemmed from the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, passed in 2025.
“Meta is one of the largest investors in research and development in the United States,” said Andy Stone, a company spokesman. “Over the last five years, Meta invested $200 billion in R&D — $57 billion in the last year alone, advancing frontier research, building new technology and supporting American jobs. Like other companies that invest at this scale, we use the tax incentives Congress established decades ago to encourage this type of domestic investment.”
A Very Favorable Tax Credit
The tax break dates to the first year of the Reagan administration, when Japan was a global leader in technological innovation. Business lobbyists and legislators were worried that America’s fledgling tech sector would fall behind, so Congress created the Research & Experimentation Tax Credit as an incentive to take risks and invest in inventions that might not pan out commercially. A few years after the credit was created, a government report said it had been used to develop, among other things, electronic banking equipment and drugs to treat cancer.
Tax rules already permitted tech companies to write off research expenses from their taxable income. The new credit was even more generous and could be taken on top of the deduction. But it was harder to qualify for. Companies have to meet a complex four-part test to prove they are running an experiment, not just rolling out a new product.
In the summer of 2024, Meta was ramping up its efforts to compete in the Silicon Valley A.I. race, breaking ground on tens of thousands of acres of data centers across the country. This was an expensive endeavor. One of the biggest expenses of any A.I. data center was computer chips, which are made by companies like Nvidia and cost thousands of dollars each. A Meta employee overseeing the build-out had a creative idea to offset the costs: Tap the credit.
The credit is meant to spur innovation by encouraging companies to tackle unsolved problems and technical challenges. While Meta is testing different physical layouts for server racks and looking for the best way to network thousands of chips for A.I. training, the chips themselves are known to work. They have been at the center of A.I.’s progress for the last decade and turned Nvidia into the world’s most valuable company.
Some in Meta’s finance department questioned whether this tactic would pass muster with the I.R.S., according to a person familiar with the matter. The I.R.S. has rejectedother companies’ efforts to claim the credit for “proven and commercially available equipment and technology.”
The company sought advice from lawyers at multiple firms, who pointed to a relevant case from 2021, in which a federal judge denied the research tax break to an Indiana shipbuilder for the cost of building new types of vessels. Simply creating a new product wasn’t enough; a company must pinpoint the specific components of a project that were technically uncertainand prove it used scientific experiments to overcome that uncertainty.
One of the lawyers Meta consulted was Jeffrey Moeller at Ivins, Phillips and Barker, people familiar with the conversations said. Mr. Moeller represented the pharmaceutical maker Bayer in a $200 million dispute with the I.R.S. over research tax credits. In an interview, he would not comment specifically on Meta. But he did say the rules could permit claiming the credit on commercially available, proven products — if they were supplies required to resolve the uncertainty of a project.
Another lawyer consulted by Meta, those people said, was Alex Sadler, a former Department of Justice tax lawyer and now a partner at Morgan Lewis, which declined a request to interview him. But when he spoke at a tax conference in Virginia this month, Mr. Sadler said that pilot models were an “area of controversy” and that the I.R.S. “doesn’t like” when companies characterize commercial production as research to claim the credit. The I.R.S. takes issue with the use of the research tax credit for “big things,” he said.
“What if we have a $10 billion data center that does cool stuff that hasn’t really been done?” he said. “Is all the cost a research expenditure?”
After a few months of deliberation, Meta took the plunge. It started labeling chips bound for A.I. data centers differently for tax purposes from those sent to standard data centers, two people with knowledge of the matter said.
Risky Business
The strategy has been lucrative. Meta said the research tax credit shaved $2 billion off its taxes in 2024, and then $3.9 billion in 2025.
That is a significant increase from the $700 million the company reported in 2023, the year before it embarked on its data center strategy.
But because the I.R.S. was likely to challenge this new and untested accounting magic, the company had to acknowledge the risk in a securities disclosure called “unrecognized tax benefits.” That is essentially the gap between what Meta paid to the I.R.S. and how much it might owe if tax authorities challenge its maneuvers. It’s a warning to investors that Meta made a bet, and the amount of the gap reflects the odds of losing, as determined by a company’s tax advisers.
Since Meta began its research credit A.I. strategy, the amount set aside to cover those tax bets increased 45 percent — to $18.74 billion today from $12.9 billion two years ago. The contributing factor listed first in its annual financial filing is “uncertainties with our research tax credits.”
Other major tech companies, including Apple, Amazon, Alphabet and Microsoft, also report research tax credits of more than $1 billion a year. But none of them have flagged the research tax credit as a risk in their financial reports to investors or disclosed whether they have used it for A.I. data centers.
“Meta is claiming billions of dollars in tax benefits that its own accountants are telling investors are at risk of being overturned by the I.R.S.,” said Lisa De Simone, a former tax adviser at EY who teaches accounting at the University of Texas business school.
Mr. Stone, the Meta spokesman, said that “unrecognized tax benefits are simply a mandated accounting measure of uncertainty.” He called them a “snapshot in time reflecting the status of unresolved issues and reflect many different types of uncertainties.”
Another of Meta’s unresolved issues concerns one of the biggest U.S. Tax Court disputes in the country’s history: The I.R.S. is seeking nearly $16 billion in taxes and penalties on profits it says the company shifted to the Cayman Islands from the United States.
Tax credit experts said Meta was again entering choppy waters by taking this huge tax break on data centers. Shawn Marchant, who runs the credit and incentives practice at Tanner and advised on the research incentive for more than a decade at EY, said he would be “skeptical” of claiming it for all the computer chips in all the data centers. Mr. Shevchuck, the tax adviser at BPM, proposed one way it might work: “If you had a data center that you’re building out to cure cancer.”
Meta declined to answer questions about what made its A.I. data centers experimental, and why tens of billions of dollars of chips and computing equipment qualified for the research tax credit.
Meta’s auditor, EY, had to sign off on the plan. The global tax and accounting firm was among the firms that Meta consulted on using the tax credit in the first place. EY has since pitched other companies on using the research credit to buy computer chips for A.I. training.
Innovation or Creative Accounting?
James Shannon, a former U.S. representative from Massachusetts who sponsored the research tax credit in 1981, said it had been intended to support “people power, knowledge, information,” and not “making things.”He was surprised to hear that a technology company would use the credit for supplying A.I. data centers.
“This has gone way, way beyond what anybody could have imagined,” Mr. Shannon said.
Whether the tax break inspires the innovation that he and other lawmakers sought is a matter of debate. Some companies appear to use the credit for spending they would do anyway, according to a study last year by economists at the University of Southern California. If companies “simply reclassify existing spending as R&D,” the researchers wrote, they are getting the tax breaks “without meaningfully financing innovation.”
The credit has become the second-most expensive federal corporate tax break, behind only the reduced rate applied to offshore profits. In its most recent estimate, the congressional Joint Committee on Taxation projected the credit would cost the government $32.1 billion in 2025.Meta alone would be responsible for more than a tenth of that.
Dylan Freedman and Kitty Bennett contributed research.
Kashmir Hill writes about technology and how it is changing people’s everyday lives with a particular focus on privacy. She has been covering technology for more than a decade.
Jesse Drucker is an investigative reporter for the Business section and has written extensively on the world of high end tax avoidance.
Eli Tan covers the technology industry for The Times from San Francisco.
Mike Isaac is The Times’s Silicon Valley correspondent, based in San Francisco. He covers the world’s most consequential tech companies, and how they shape culture both online and offline.
Peter Thiel on AI and tech stagnation and democracy
