If they’re smart they hopefully have incorporated and will only need to take money out of the corporation to pay themselves to cover their expenses. So they won’t pay tax on the full amount up front and will have most of the money pretax for future business expenses
That's not how corporate income tax works though; the company pays taxes on all that sales income less expenses, and then they would likely take dividends at a preferential tax rate and pay yet some more tax. I doubt they've been carrying much of a loss over the past 20+ years to offset this.
It would take 20 years to pull it off, and tax legislation may change, but a married couple can earn next year ~$115k/yr federally tax-free ($89k long-term cap gains + $27k earned income). So that source of income would only be subject to the initial 20% corporate tax.
This blogpost [1] explains in detail but the gist is:
* Standard-deduction next year is $27,700 married ($13,850 single)
* Long-term-capital-gains is 0% on first $89,250 ($44,625 single)
Thus if you have the tooling to perfectly control your income, e.g. you take $27,700 in treasury bill payments and then sell off enough stock (or take qualified dividends from your corporation's bank account) in the total of $89,250, you'd end up with:
* Ordinary Income: $27,700 - standard deduction of $27,700 = $0 taxable income
* Long-Term-Capital-Gains of $89,250 = 0% ltcg tax bracket
= $116,950 ($58,427 single) of federally tax-free income
Then if you're in a no-income-tax state (such as WA, like the Adams brothers), you don't owe any taxes at all.
If it’s a C-corp, then the corporation will have to pay income tax on its profit. If it’s an S-corp, then the owners will have to pay income tax of the corporate profits even if they do stay in the corporate coffers.
As far as I know you can do clever accounting with IP licensing but I don’t know the specifics well enough to know if it’s feasible at the scale the Adams are operating at
