Interim CFO. Tax economics, PE finance, and motorsport and boats
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Mark Hendy retweeted
"Hay dos maneras de satisfacer las necesidades humanas: una es trabajando y ahorrando, que es la manera del capitalismo. Otra es robando al que tiene, que es la manera del socialismo"
Franz Oppenheimer
Mark Hendy retweeted
Recently I was talking with a friend about universal geniuses. And something struck me.
Florence, 1480–1510. Same city, same moment: Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Machiavelli, Botticelli, Pico della Mirandola. Raphael right behind them. They walked the same streets.
Europe, 1600–1700. Galileo, Kepler, Descartes, Pascal, Huygens, Newton, Leibniz. In two generations, we got calculus, modern mechanics, probability theory, and the scientific method.
Athens, 470–320 BC. Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Sophocles, Phidias, Thucydides. One century, one city, and the foundations of Western thought were laid.
Europe, 1890–1930. Poincaré, Hilbert, Einstein, Marie Curie, Tesla, Planck, Bohr, then von Neumann.
Always the same pattern. In every great era, the West had 15 to 20 minds of this caliber alive at the same time. People who could touch everything and push the frontier of several fields at once.
Today we have one. Just one. Elon Musk.
And Elon is an anomaly.
Not in the sense that he shouldn't exist. In the sense that the world we built is designed so that someone like him never emerges. Statistically, he shouldn't be here.
Because what forged Elon was an absolutely insane move.
October 2002. eBay buys PayPal. Elon walks away with roughly $180M. Anyone else buys an island and never works another day.
He puts $100M into SpaceX, $70M into Tesla, $10M into SolarCity. Almost everything. On rockets and electric cars, two industries no sane person wanted to touch.
2006–2008. The first three Falcon 1 launches fail. Tesla is burning cash, the financial crisis hits, investors run. He has enough left for one last launch. Just one. He borrows money from friends to pay his rent.
September 28, 2008. The fourth launch reaches orbit.
December 23, 2008. NASA awards SpaceX a $1.6B contract.
December 24, 2008. The Tesla round closes at the last possible hour. A few more days and everything collapses.
That's what a genius is. Not just IQ. The ability to put everything on the table when the entire world tells you it's impossible, and be right.
Now the real question: why do we only have one?
Because a genius needs three things. The freedom to try. The right to get massively rich if it works. The right to fail without being destroyed.
And that's exactly what the collectivist left and the technocrats have torn down across the West for the past 50 years.
They turned success into suspicion. Making a lot of money became a moral failing. Taking risks became irresponsible. Rising above the crowd became an insult to equality.
They stacked up norms, committees, permits, regulations written in Brussels by people who have never built anything in their lives. In Europe, Elon would never have been allowed to blow up three rockets. He'd have been stopped at the first form.
They want to tax capital before it even exists, cap fortunes, redistribute what others created by risking everything.
They replaced excellence with conformity. Our schools produce docile people, not dangerous ones. And a genius, by definition, is someone who disrupts. Their entire system is built to neutralize the people who disrupt.
The result: where we should have 15 to 20 universal geniuses alive at the same time, we have one.
Just one.
And you want to put him in prison.
You summon him before judges, you raid his offices, you insult him morning, noon and night, you dream of breaking up his companies. The man who lands rockets vertically and wants to take humanity to Mars.
You're disgusting.
History won't remember your names. It remembers Galileo, not the inquisitors who tried to silence him.
Mark Hendy retweeted
In the 2025 drought the government asked people to delete their old emails to save water, and that one piece of advice tells you most of what you need to know about the beef water myth.
The reason it gave was data centres. They cool themselves with water, and a big one can get through 1.5 million litres a day, the supply of a small town. That is real water. Pumped, piped, evaporated, gone.
Now take the number you've been hit with for years: a kilo of beef needs 15,000 litres of water. British researchers ran the sum for English beef and got even more, 17,700 litres. Then they said what it was:
- English beef: 84% rain
- English lamb: 97% rain
That is rain falling on a field, drawn up through the grass and breathed back out of the leaf. It happens with a cow on the field or without one. An empty field does not save a drop.
Take the rain out and the beef figure shrinks to a sixth. The lamb figure shrinks to a thirtieth, because a hill sheep drinks from the sky and eats what the sky grew.
Even the cow's own drinking water comes back. A milking cow drinks up to 155 litres on a hot day, turns some of it into milk, and returns most of the rest to the field.
- 1 data centre: 1,500,000 litres a day, into the air
- 1 milking cow: 155 litres a day, back onto the grass
The beef water figure counts the weather. The data centre figure counts the tap.
When the taps actually ran low, nobody in government asked you to give up beef. They asked you to delete your photos.
Mark Hendy retweeted
The top comment on the BBC's budget coverage. The government hasn't woken up to how far the dial has shifted.
Mark Hendy retweeted
What sort of country gives loads of its people's money to other countries, then pleads poverty to its people and taxes them into oblivion?
This one 🇬🇧
Mark Hendy retweeted
The hidden tax measure in the Budget is huge for people paying tax under self-assessment - sole traders, partners, landlords, retired investors.
For 6th April 2028-29, you currently pay 50% of your income tax late in the tax year in question (in January 2029), 50% just after the year end (in July 2029) with any make-up payment in January 2030.
Under the new proposals you will pay your tax perhaps monthly or quarterly (TBC) from April 2029 onwards. A rough analysis suggests the impact is to draw about 50% of your tax bill forward, a huge cashflow boost to HMRC and a significant funding issue for the self-employed.
The Treasury recognises this, and expects to raise £1.3bn of additional tax in 29/30 as a result of this change.
The cashflow impact of the accelerated charge will send some businesses to the wall.
Mark Hendy retweeted
The Founders Relief conditions are like saying it's open to all people above 8ft in height who can crawl through a hose pipe. Labour are completely clueless about business. Incentives are supposed to be achievable.
I'm working on a transaction at the moment. Privately owned target to Private Equity. It won't qualify for the "Founders Relief" because the qualifying criterior (under consultation) are so narrow. I can't see many private businesses qualifying TBH
HM Treasury published the Founders' Relief technical consultation today, and the rules are much tighter than old Entrepreneurs' Relief. I checked the consultation document and the Budget tax overview on GOV.UK
The founder must:
have held at least 25% of the shares when the company started trading, or started preparing to trade, have held the shares for at least 5 years before selling, and have been UK resident for 5 tax years in a row before the sale.
The company must:
be a trading company or the holding company of a trading group, with no EIS-style excluded trades such as land dealing, financial services or property development, still be running the trade it was set up for,
have a substantial UK presence for the 5 accounting periods before the sale, and have had at least £10m turnover and at least 15 full-time staff in the year before the sale. Directors, contractors and agency workers don't count towards the 15.
It must also pass two of these three tests:
turnover growing 25% a year on average over three years in a row, from a £10m base, full-time headcount growing 25% a year over three years in a row, from a base of 15, and at least £1.5m of R&D spend claimed under R&D tax relief in the three years before the sale.
Budget in three numbers: headroom cut from £23.6bn to £15bn, debt interest up £14bn this year, growth next year cut from 1.6% to 1.0%.
This is a spending-control problem, not a revenue problem.
The model flatters; cash tells the truth.
The 30yr bond yield at 11:45, before todays budget is trading at 5.749%, well above the Truss peak of 5.1% Lets see how the markets like this coming budget.
Mark Hendy retweeted
Let me remove my economist hat for a second and make a comment which, speaking as an ordinary citizen in a personal capacity, might capture a lot of the frustration the British public has with this generation of policymakers.
How can it be that a new government with a £1.3 TRILLION budget (40% of GDP) sees ‘doing no harm’ as a good outcome for its first Budget when people are being told to stockpile three days’ worth of water and food in case of an emergency?
£1.3 TRILLION to spend this year, likely rising to north of £1.5 TRILLION by 2030, and the government argues it does not have the resources to take the necessary bold measures on energy security, defence and AI.
None of this is even remotely serious.
#Budget #Budget2026
@JohnHealey_MP @RobertJenrick @afneil @KemiBadenoch
Eye-catching policy tweaks will make headlines, but financial markets are likely to look through the noise and focus on three issues at today’s Budget:
1. Borrowing costs: UK benchmark interest rates are too high, crowding out private economic activity, and are caused by years of inflationary fiscal and regulatory policies. A good Budget would be one that allows markets to reduce the “moron premium” priced into UK debt.
2. Inflation impulses: The government’s planned deficit reduction should be disinflationary over the medium term. But any near-term giveaways to ease cost-of-living pressures that are not offset within this fiscal year would add to short-term inflation pressures, keeping benchmark rates elevated and heaping pressure on the Bank of England to tighten.
3. Issuance: Headroom above £15bn should draw a decent market reaction, and £20bn better still. But how much debt is issued around the rules matters more. “Your First Home” equity loans buy a financial asset, but require debt issuance to fund them in the first instance. Will Healey use this trick to finance other initiatives too? If gilt markets see heavy issuance on the horizon, even a positive surprise on the headroom number could see yields rise.
#healey #Budget #Budget2026
Mark Hendy retweeted
In 1990, 1.7 million British people paid the 40% rate of income tax.
By 2027, almost 9 million are projected to pay higher or additional rates.
From roughly 1 in 15 income taxpayers to more than 1 in 5.
On Budget Day, it’s worth remembering that higher-rate tax has become an increasingly ordinary tax on aspiration.
Britain needs lower taxes & less government in our lives.
Settling with the liquidator closes the company's claim on your overdrawn loan account. It doesn't close HMRC's.
Fullerton: £742k treated as written off, taxed as dividend income, plus a careless penalty.
Directors, read this before you sign. tanous.co.uk/2026/10/28/full…
![Fullerton [2026] UKFTT 1479: a liquidator settlement still cannot manufacture a clean write-off of...](https://pbs.twimg.com/card_img/2115369810020151296/KXQOpKS6?format=jpg&name=800x419)
Mark Hendy retweeted
Today's balancing costs are already over £20 million
That's staggering
Wind is forecast to drop off this afternoon so the costs should normalise later, but with this much so early it's going to be another expensive day
Still don't understand why @neso_energy doesn't curtail the wind before the DA auction so gas can self-dispatch at lower cost and there would be no need to reverse interconnector trades
Plus for goodness sake ditch Connect and Manage so we don't make this any worse
@Miatsf @mgshanks @AndrewBowie_MP @ClaireCoutinho @harrietc @ColinMoynihanUK @drlukeevans @ashley7fox @TiceRichard @cmackinlay @DavidGHFrost @mattwridley @Iromg @AllisonPearson @MerrynSW @EdConwaySky @afneil @mattotele @jonathan_leake @julietsamuel @energygovuk
