Tumblr is losing $30M each year, CEO says

Would that be genuinelly losing $30M a year or would it be only "losing" it in accounting terms because of paying more than $30M a year for "trademark use rights" to a company based in an offshore tax haven, said company being nothing more than a metal plate on a door next to the plates for 100s of such "companies" and 100% owned by the very same parent company as Tumblr?

Because if there's one thing which is common in Tech companies is using intelectual property legislation and convoluted corporate structures to create accounting losses for the purposed of paying no taxes (and publicly claiming poverty).

Same thing in Hollywood (hence the expression "Hollywood Accounting"), by the way, which is how they just recently claimed they "couldn't pay more because they were losing money" to the actors' union representatives during recent negotiations.

Mind you, such accounting trickeries can be undone by Courts (which can just deem that the "for tax evasion only" daughter company is not actually a real company set up to do business, so all those "intellectual property costs" used to create accounting losses legally become just an internal transfer of money within the same company, hence not a cost, hence do not reduce declared profits and the tax on them.

However there is no actual Political will to do so, which is why even though the laws for it are in the books, they're almost never applied.