Man Becomes Overnight Millionaire After Meteorite Crashes Through His Roof

https://www.ndtv.com/offbeat/man-becomes-overnight-millionaire-after-meteorite-crashes-through-his-roof-2327321?pfrom=home-lateststories

by akbarnama • 6 years ago

121 59 6 years ago

ndtv.com

ISL• 6 years ago

That's the kind of lottery that requires buying zero tickets :).

garbagetime• 6 years ago

Buying tickets would render one ineligible?

anonymou2• 6 years ago

Is it more, less or equally probably to win the lottery? If it is the same or less there is no need to buy lottery tickets, we are all playing all the time :-)

dmurray2• 6 years ago

Much less likely. Thousands of people win $1 million or more in lotteries every year. Only a handful have their houses hit by million-dollar meteorites.

simonh2• 6 years ago

Its more like everyone getting one lottery ticket for free, but with the option of buying more. Anyway I suspect people winning lotteries is more frequent that people having meteorites hit their house.

dice1-6• 6 years ago

you have to have a house ;) in some places it is quite an expensive ticket :D

namanaggarwal• 6 years ago

Do you need to pay capital gains tax on such winnings (or may be some other tax). How will one declare the source.

csunbird• 6 years ago

I assume that the procedure would be the like as you had discovered oil or gold mine in your property.

kristopolous2• 6 years ago

IANAL and certainly not a tax lawyer but I believe this one is easy. In the US, the treasure trove case https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cesarini_v._United_States ... This also covers found precious metal on property and I'd imagine when these precious goods arrived isn't important, only when you found them.

Here's an example of it in action; arguably a pretty similar case to a precious metal falling out of the sky: https://www.forbes.com/sites/robertwood/2014/02/26/couple-fi.... Apparently the numismatists of the world have a name for this stash if you're interested: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saddle_Ridge_Hoard

dmurray2• 6 years ago

I don't think this is right. Treasure trove covers finding money on your property. Refined precious metals (gold and silver particularly) are historically and legally treated as money for many purposes. But a gold mine isn't.

This seems to me more like discovering a gold mine. You can't buy things with your meteorite, or divide it indefinitely into smaller pieces that keep their value pro rata. Even if it was filled with platinum ore, you'd need to smelt and refine it.

The tax treatment of treasure trove in the US is different from the treatment of discovering gold or oil: in brief, you owe taxes when you find it, instead of when you sell it or its products.

Edit: another legal question, what if you don't own the mineral rights under your own home?

analog31• 6 years ago

Yes, 4.5 billion years qualifies as a long term capital gain.

dahart2• 6 years ago

In Indonesia (where the man who found the meteorite lives), “Capital gains are considered ordinary income and are taxed at the standard corporate income tax rate.“ according to https://www2.deloitte.com/content/dam/Deloitte/global/Docume...

Hnrobert42• 6 years ago

I wonder why they are storing it in liquid nitrogen.

boomboomsubban• 6 years ago

Air is caustic, and depending on the exact type these meteorites can crumble very quickly.

adamjb• 6 years ago

He tells the BBC a very different story.

"Saya jual Rp200 juta, ternyata harganya Rp26 miliar"
"I sold it for 200 million rupiah (~$16k USD), it turned out to be worth 26 billion rupiah (~$1.8M USD)"
Uang itu pun sudah habis dibagi-bagi kepada keluarga, yatim piatu, gereja, dan perbaikan makam orangtua
The money has been distributed towards families, orphans, churches and fixing parents' graves.
"Uangnya sudah habis, cuma Rp200 juta"
"The money is already gone, only 200 million rupiah"
"Kalau betul (harganya) Rp26 miliar, saya merasa dibohongi. Saya kecewa."
If it's true (that it's worth) 26 billion rupiah, I feel lied to. I am disappointed."

https://www.bbc.com/indonesia/majalah-54996882

monoideism• 6 years ago

I doubt it's worth anywhere near a million pounds, but the article does say that the buyer immediately resold it to a collector, so I suspect it could have been worth considerably more than the $16 000 he got.

cher88• 6 years ago

Based on the BBC article in the parent comment, the buyer wasn’t actually a buyer / reseller but just a middleman representing the collector. And he said that though he wasn’t privy to the price paid, it wasn’t $16K but was also not as much as $1M. He also said no meteorite is worth $1M.

m-i-l• 6 years ago

That's awful if true. I guess technically the headline is still correct if you're talking about a millionaire in Rupiah terms (but 1 million Rupiah is only about USD 70). So is the man who became a millionaire (in dollar terms) the collector from the USA?

pmiller24• 6 years ago

I would guess someone who's spending $16K on a meteorite is probably already very well off, if not a millionaire.

justinclift• 6 years ago

Maybe sounds more like it was bought for the "Centre for Meteorite Studies at Arizona State University"?

ArtWomb• 6 years ago

A microcosm of human life on planet earth can be found solely in the market for meteorites ;)

Man Becomes Overnight Millionaire After Meteorite Crashes Through His Roof

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