Steve Jobs had his famous license plate-less Mercedes. While that man is praised for too many things, perhaps he deserves credit for not pretending to not presume himself to be above you or me, unlike so many of his successors today. An honest sort of arrogance.
To tie it back to the original post at the start of this thread, and to the TC article- then we wouldn't be talking about Silicon Valley. Or other places of great wealth.
I wasn't actually praising Steve Jobs. I was just pointing that at least he was a rich elite jerk who was open about being a jerk, unlike so many of our contemporary rich elite jerks who cover it up because they're afraid of others realizing their mission statements and grand visions are just excuses to amass wealth and power.
The real jerk move if you’re a billionaire driving a Nissan is to be silent when it comes to taxing wealth. Since you don’t appear to need the money (driving a Nissan), then dump it into laying fiber, building bridges, repairing roads and paying teachers, etc... Put your algorithms to work finding the greatest good, because one way or another you ought to be putting over half back into your community (taxes or charity). That would look more like real modesty to me
The part where he drove it for the maximum legal time he was not required to affix his license plates to the car (six months), and then leased a new one [1].
You need to be able to drive before your plates are mailed to you (or you pick them up at the DMV). Usually you're required to use a temporary paper license plate... maybe California is different on that? And 6 months is a really long time, something like 14 days should be plenty of time.
There was incentive for delaying it as long as possible, for example you could evade tolls that were charged based on license plate readers.
It looks like as of this year (in California at least) there is now a requirement to have a temporary plate that is in the same location as the permanent one, partly to prevent people doing the above:
I'm pretty sure CA just updated the law so that you now have to have a more descriptive paper plate affixed where your license plate should go. Basically they were having problems with people evading tolls and running red lights when they had no plates.