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BG2 · 4 min · Jul 10, 2025

Invest America accounts allow tax-free employer contributions

Brad Gerstner · Founder & CEO, Altimeter Capital

Brad Gerstner outlines annual contribution limits and early corporate interest, plus evidence that low-income households save at similar rates when they have accounts.

In this episode

Full episode
  1. 4:09Dell’s six-day inventory created a lasting cash advantagePro pick 4 min
  2. 46:13AI productivity could justify trillions in annual investment7 min
  3. 57:13AI compute demand grows as models use more tokensPro pick 5 min
  4. 53:39Dell's AI server orders exceeded its prior-year shipments4 min
  5. 36:55Private capital gives AI labs room to spend on talent3 min
  6. 18:59Invest America accounts allow tax-free employer contributions4 min
  7. 27:37Dell distinguishes national debt from a spending problem3 min
  8. 1:12:17Export rules can leave foreign-made substitutes unrestricted3 min
“Companies can give twenty five hundred dollars a year per recipient tax free.”
Brad Gerstnerat 19:25 · BG2
19:25

Takeaways

  1. Families and friends can contribute up to $5,000 a year.
  2. Employers can contribute $2,500 per recipient tax-free.
  3. Low-income households save at similar rates when they have accounts.

About this segment

Brad Gerstner outlines annual contribution limits and early corporate interest, plus evidence that low-income households save at similar rates when they have accounts. The details shape how widely the program can spread.

Brad Gerstner, Host

Founder & CEO, Altimeter Capital

Started Altimeter with under $3M in 2008; an early backer of Snowflake.

  • Bill Gurley, Host · General partner, Benchmark

    Backed and sat on the boards of Uber, Zillow, OpenTable and Stitch Fix.

From “Michael Dell – Invest America Act Becomes Law, AI Talent Wars, Compute Demand, Market Update | BG2”, Jul 10, 2025. Watch the full episode

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

  1. 19:05

    get it put in a reconciliation bill. It's one thing to get high-level buy-in. But just in the last two weeks, we were negotiating the nitty gritty. I think this was 23 pages of tax, you know, changes in the reconciliation bill associated with the Invest America Act. So families can give or recipients can receive up to five thousand dollars a year from family, from friends, you know, etc. Companies can give twenty five hundred dollars a year per recipient tax free.

  2. 19:36

    So pre-tax. So Dell Corporation, for example, has raised their hand and said, you know, we intend to give to the kids of our employees. So has Uber. So has NVIDIA. So has Oracle. So has Salesforce. So has T-Mobile. So has iHeartMedia. So, you know, it's an incredible list that has already come together. And we're going to go to the business roundtable. We're going to go to the companies in America, and we're going to ask them all to do it. Now, we're not telling them the amount they need to give. All we're saying is give an amount that's appropriate to your company and to your employee base. I just heard from Tony yesterday at DoorDash. He retweeted something about this. Sam Altman, I heard from over the weekend once he heard it was passed, retweeted something about this. So I think the business enthusiasm is going to be very big and

  3. 20:25

    substantial. But remember, the most powerful givers are moms and dads, grandparents, friends, birthdays and bar mitzvahs. And all of those dollars ultimately like don't really generally find a home for savings and compounding. And we're going to make it as easy as Venmoing in this money, Apple paying money in. And, you know, one of the studies that we did that was really profound in partnership with the Milken Institute, they found a whole host of things. One was that low-income cohorts tend to save at about the same rate as higher-income cohorts if they have an account. The problem is that nobody in a low-income cohort has a savings account or investment account. So I think you're going to see a lot of contributions by all sorts of folks Once we set this up, we also learned that once we do this, kids are more likely to graduate from high school and college, more likely to start a business, more likely to buy a home, less likely to be incarcerated.

  4. 21:28

    So I think the societal ROI of this will be really large over time. And it sounds like you're going to try and find a way where if someone wanted to donate, Michael mentioned zip codes, but some other way that if people wanted to just target the low income, most needy, that there'll be a way to do that. So this was really, this was a really important issue to Michael and to myself. And, and, you know, I'll just, you know, give you a bit of a window into the weeds. You know, we tried to get household income as one of the, one of the targeting mechanisms, and we weren't able to get bipartisan agreement on that.

  5. 22:06

    But we were able to get a proxy for that, which is you can target by zip codes. So you can target down to groups of 5,000 or more by zip code. And we think through that geotargeting. So, for example, Michael could target the Rio Grande Valley. I could target East Oakland. So there are zip codes that you could target that I think certainly include a predominance of lower income households. That's fantastic.