Icahn and Gross, in a public exchange of Twitter posts over the past week, have prodded each other to devote more effort to helping people. Gross, who started the discussion on Oct. 24, said Icahn should stop pushing Apple Inc. for a stock buyback and instead spend more time on philanthropy like Bill Gates, the Microsoft Corp. co-founder, and his wife, Melinda.
“Developed economies work best when inequality of incomes are at a minimum,” Gross wrote. “By reducing the 20 percent of national income that ‘golden scrooges’ now earn, by implementing more equitable tax reform that equalizes capital gains, carried interest and nominal income tax rates, we might move up the list to challenge more productive economies such as Germany and Canada.”
The share of private-equity managers’ profits in buyout deals is known as carried interest. President Barack Obama’s 2014 budget proposal released in April had proposed taxing carried interest at ordinary income rates rather than preferential rates provided to long-term capital gains.
The $250 billion Total Return Fund managed by Gross has gained 0.93 percent in the past month, outperforming 58 percent of comparable funds, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. The fund has returned 8.4 percent on an annual basis in the past five years, placing it in the 77 percentile.
Pimco, a unit of the Munich-based insurer Allianz SE, managed $1.97 trillion in assets as of June 30.