Not Someone to Ever Take No for Answer, When Bill Gates’s Porsche Was Seized by U.S. Customs, He Patiently Paid a $28 Fine Every Day for 13 Years. The Lawmakers Finallysd Bent to His Will and the Microsoft Co-Founder Unshackled His Dream Car From the Port of Seattle.
21st July 2025
In 1988, Bill Gates purchased a Porsche 959 and had it shipped to the United States. There was just one problem. The 959 had never been crash tested for US regulations, nor did it comply with emissions standards. Porsche was unwilling to sacrifice one of these incredibly expensive cars for the required testing, and so the 959 was not approved for road use in the United States. When Gates’s car arrived at the Port of Seattle, US Customs had no choice but to impound it. Rather than destroy it or send it back to Europe, the car was placed in a Foreign-Trade Zone warehouse.
The problem here is government. Bureaucrats laid down that a certain number of production models of a car had to be crash-tested in order to become ‘street legal’. This is marginally understandable when you are talking about a Ford F-150 or a Honda Civic, but the whole logic of the requirement breaks down when you’re talking about a limited-edition very expensive sports car. But bureaucrats are bureaucrats, and You Must Follow The Rules No Matter How Stupid. No accountability, no reasonableness, just a stubborn cling to irrationality.
The rules of the Foreign-Trade Zone allowed Customs to charge a storage and handling fee for vehicles in limbo. At the time, that fee was $28 per calendar day. Gates, unwilling to part with the car or destroy a technological marvel, simply kept paying the fee. Day after day. Month after month. Year after year. By the time the car was finally released, the meter had run for 13 years. The storage alone had cost him over $133,000. Adjusted for inflation, that would be around $300,000 today. And that’s not even counting the modest annual bond renewal fee of around 500 dollars that had to be paid to keep the car legally bonded.
When you’re the world’s richest man, you can do that. Ordinary people aren’t that lucky.
But the significant part is how the headline is worded by these ‘journalists’. ‘The Lawmakers Finally Bent to His Will’ incorporates the unacknowledge assumption that the ‘lawmakers’ were right and Gates was wrong and he merely got his way because of Rich Privilege or something, not the truth, which is that the ‘lawmakers’ were being dicks and that doesn’t work as well with The World’s Richest Man as it does for Joe Sixpack. When they write, ‘journalists’ are on the side of the Deep State every time, unless and until somebody calls them on it–and sometimes even then.
Government is why we can never have nice things.