#116 with Kelly Erb - Tax Expert Breaks Down Trump Taxes and Big Businesses Ran by Few People

**Shaan Puri** (0:00)
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Okay, sweet. So I'm here with Tax Girl. I'm here with Kelly Erb, who has a great handle and domain. I gotta give you credit. You've branded the hell out of yourself. So you have at Tax Girl on Twitter, and you have taxgirl.com. So already, you're my kind of person for having this kind of pretty interesting self-branding, plus just being, you know, most people who understand taxes don't understand social media and content, and you seem to do so. So am I right in that assessment?

**Kelly Erb** (1:18)
I hope so.
Thank you for saying words. Yeah, no, I actually started out, I think pretty early on in the kind of the tax writing business. I was an attorney that just started writing about tax. And at the time, I think a lot of people were writing really technical pieces.
And I didn't think that made sense. So I was trying to be more accessible. So that's kind of how that evolved.

**Shaan Puri** (1:41)
And when I'm on your Twitter right now, it's showing me at TaxMama and at TaxTweet as people I may like. Are these your rivals? Is it Tax Girl versus TaxMama?

**Kelly Erb** (1:51)
No, well, so first of all, TaxMama is awesome.
She's amazing. No, actually, what's really cool about TaxTwitter, which is our little sub Twitter, is that they're really great people. So we're not so much rivals as we are colleagues. Great.

**Shaan Puri** (2:06)
Okay, I love it.
And you had this Forbes article go viral recently. That was, I'll read the title. It was The Ordinary Taxpayer's Guide to the Extraordinary Story of Trump's Tax Returns. And I was looking at Forbes and basically I would say like, you've been a contributor and I would say your normal post will get thousands of reads, of views, I guess. It shows it on the site.
And this one has over 200,000 views. So this one definitely hit a nerve, which I'm guessing you kind of had an inkling it would or did this exceed your expectations?

**Kelly Erb** (2:39)
So the thing about tax coverage that's really tricky is that when you talk about views, if you were to look at my articles in March, you know, it's not unusual for one to get a million or two views, right? But for this time of year, people don't talk about tax in September, just as a general rule. Like, you know, people are over it by now.
So the coverage doesn't usually start up again until like December when people are thinking year end.
So yeah, to have a lot of views on something that doesn't directly impact you as a tax story is pretty unusual, I'd say. I did expect some coverage of it. I think the thing that I got a lot of impact on social media because actually, I think it's probably been shared more than it's been read is that people were interested in the fact that my, that particular article is more about the mechanics and not about the politics. And so I think that that was something that kind of caught a lot of people's eye because I think right now a lot of people feel like the information that they're getting is just so filtered that they sometimes just want to know the, they just want to know the stuff. They don't want to know all the extra and they don't want this perspective.

**Shaan Puri** (3:59)
This wasn't Trump is evil or Trump is the best. This was, hey, here's how you should think about this information that was released and what you can and can't draw from it, which I thought was a good kind of like just the information part that you're talking about. Okay, so yeah, this got a bunch of views. It's like, you know, selling a Christmas tree in May.
You sold a lot of Christmas trees in May randomly. So I think that's what's interesting about doing this article, not during tax season. So I think there's two things that I wanted to talk to you about. Number one was, you know, you say in this post, you're like, you know, I'm not gonna kind of comment on, you know, this is not an opinion piece on, you know, to give you my take on Trump's tax returns because I haven't seen them and you should go read the article.