Which is more evil? Spending $1 million on a wristwatch, or selling them to suckers?

Mark Zuckerberg – congrats on your new million dollar wristwatch. From Switzerland. The place which also invented secret numbered bank accounts.

But did Zuck pay the 9.13% sales tax owed? He lives in Palo Alto, and should have paid state sales tax, county tax, and city tax. He certainly didn’t have Jeff Bezos deliver this via Amazon to his home address.

Maybe it was shipped from Switzerland directly to Facebook’s offices in Delaware? META has a legal (and physical) presence there because they’re incorporated in Delaware. And the "Diamond state" has zero has ZERO sales tax. Savings? About $91,300!

It might even have been cheaper to fly directly to Europe and take delivery in person. This is a thing if you want save money on Porsches and Mercedes. Fly to the factory, hand them a check, and drive off on a weeklong vacation before importing the car back to the USA.

I’m not a legal expert, but it seems like dodging sales tax and customs duties should be illegal. Whether it’s a $225,000 Porsche, or a million-dollar Gruebel Forsey handmade watch.

There are a lot of things I might pay a million dollars for. If I had that much. Maybe a 4 bedroom, 5 bath home nestled in a gated community here in Tampa. Yachts? . . . not my thing so much. Anyway, Jeff Bezo’s yacht cost $500 million. He could have bought 500 watches for that. But Gruebel Forsey only makes 2 examples a year of the kind bought by Zuckerberg. That watch is quite fancy, but doesn’t have a heart rate monitor or Bluetooth connection. On the other hand, Bezos’ yacht has both a helipad AND a “tender” (support vessel) called Abeona. Its 265 feet long. Theres probably a submarine involved in all this too.

Back to the million dollar watch. Zuckerberg’s bling is “hand made”. That means probably only 1 or 2 people assembled it. Takes 6 months to put all those gears and gizmos inside. It probably took 500 people a couple years to build Bezo’s yacht. So there was more wealth redistribution involved. Bezos may have 100 full time people involved in piloting, cleaning, maintenance, repairs, and preparing meals on his boats.

But Zuckerberg and Bezos aren’t the villains here. They’re just trying to impress random strangers. A way to compensate for feelings of inferiority. A suspicion that wealth is not distributed fairly, and guilt that they spend little time "on the job" these days. Possibly the problem here is the company which tricks people into believing that million-dollar watches are proof that they are special and important.

My consolation is that next year Zuck will probably be baited into springing for the newer, $2 million upgraded model. Which still won't be as accurate and useful as an Apple Watch SE.

Mark Zuckerberg Adds a Nearly $1 Million Watch to His Already Insane Collection