"Who controls Stripe if the Collison brothers perish in a car crash ? "

Employees.

"who manages businesses that are owned by sole owners that pass away?"

Whoever they hire.

"If i work all my life to give my kids a better future, who's to say that I can't do that ?"

$20 million is plenty. Taxing someone AFTER they die is the fairest possible time to do so. Insisting you should have control of your assets even after you are dead is pretty absurd when you really think about it.

EDIT: Honestly the minimum could be $100 million or even $1 billion. The goal is to prevent a permanent class of overlords from growing.

>"Who controls Stripe if the Collison brothers perish in a car crash ? " >Employees.

The controlling interest in a company is determined by shares owned. This reads like you're suggesting that the revenue from inheritance taxes should be given in the form of shares to the employees of whichever company the deceased had ownership of.

"the revenue from inheritance taxes should be given in the form of shares to the employees of whichever company the deceased had ownership of."

This is actually a really good idea!

I actually think we are talking about different things.

I don't dispute that you are coming from a sincere POV, but my point is that you haven't thought about the 2nd order consequences.

Liquidations are always messy, and usually wipe out value, and result in real losses of jobs and of customers. Have you thought about what happens when a trained operator is moved aside, by a vote of activist staff, to a charlatan (AKA "politician")?

Or, what about the tax consequences to the employees who get the awards ? What cash do they use to pay for the award ? Now employees are forced to sell to have liquidity. Who buys from them? A vicious CEO partnered with a vulture PE? Or maybe a competitor sitting on a pile of cash, with the well connected CEO's hidden knowledge about a founder competitor's health issues, and eagerly anticipating a monopoly upon death?

There's a million ways this goes literal off the rails. No company, no jobs, complete wealth destruction. There is another name for this action, when done without "regulation" support: its called confiscation or nationalization, and its usually done by despots or tyranical govts without respect to human flourising. That tells you all you need to know about this sort of tax.

An immoral action that is not illegal, its still immoral.

The road to serfdom is paved with good intentions.

Whoever purchases the business at auction. Transition? Businesses already need to cope without a CEO for periods, such as injury. Might even go smoother if the executor gets to appoint an acting manager and is able to authorize the CFO to keep paying wages and bills.

Work all your life to give yourself and your kids excessive power over me? I didn't agree to that. Society gets to decide what the social contract is, and a lot of us are not happy that excessive wealth/power is able to be accumulated, negatively affecting our lives. Why are we forced to also accumulate unnecessary wealth in order to defend ourselves? Perhaps a better reward for success is leisure and stress free living and providing an opportunity for another to also succeed and flourish.