Something being tax deductible doesn't mean it is free. It still costs money, you just don't pay taxes over that money.

It's not gaslighting. They were transparent enough to own their mistake. The donation isn't really the main story.

Jerry, all these big companies, they write off everything.

I believe you may be misusing the term gaslighting.

I've met a few people who genuinely believe that 'tax deductible' equates to 'essentially spending nothing' or somehow equate that the amount you donate would be an amount you would otherwise give to the Government in taxes so from your perspective it doesn't change anything.

This is definitely not the case. If you make $100 profit and you would have had to pay 20% corporate tax, then you pay $20 in taxes, you'd be left with $80 to buy chocolate or whatever you want.

If you donate $20 and deduct it from your profit, then your profit is now calculated at $80. So you pay $16 in taxes. So you saved $4 but spent $20, so you're $16 dollars down and now you only have $64 for chocolate, so not 'essentially nothing'.

What if I buy chocolate as a corporate gift to my clients?! /jk

> deduct it via taxes (essentially spending nothing)

Unless you're positing some very specific, unusual situation, this isn't how tax deductibility works. The dollar amount of a tax deductible donation is subtracted from your taxable income, not from your tax bill. So you're getting a discount on the donation equal to your marginal tax rate.

> deduct it via taxes (essentially spending nothing)

That's not how tax deduction works.

Even if it were, it'd be much more than anything others that got hacked have been doing..

That’s not how tax deductions work because a tax deduction doesn’t give you the full amount of your donation back it only reduces your taxable income, not your tax bill dollar-for-dollar.

Example:

You earn $100,000.

You donate $10,000 to a qualifying charity.

You can now deduct that $10,000, i.e. you’ll be taxed as if you earned $90,000, not $100,000.

If your marginal tax rate is 30%, you’ll save 30% of $10,000 = $3,000 in taxes. So you’re still out $7,000 in real money.

It changes nothing. If you get taxes 20% til 90k and 30% above that, then donating 10k still saves you 3k in taxes, you're still out 7k and you're still paying 18k in taxes on the 90k.

This one doesn't change that much like others said, but it is still burning money. Universities and their projects waste a lot of money - from buying hardware via complicated processes to projects wasting millions of USD (in cases I know it is EUR). Sponsored by companies like Samsung or Siemens, not releasing anything useful for years and still extending projects for "further research" :(

It's their money in this case so they can burn it any way they want and great to see they didn't support script kiddies here (assuming it was some leftover files on forgotten object storage bucket, sadly unencrypted or with keys available nearby).

Lots of companies waste money too. I'd rather see universities spend it on research and studies than companies developing useless products and shutting down after a year.