your 3% mortgage, guess what: you’re doing the same thing these billionaires do. You could generate cash by selling assets or tapping retirement accounts instead, but that would be tax-inefficient to do. So you maintain/generate cash by borrowing instead. Same exact concept for these billionaires.
If you’re creditworthy, banks will be overjoyed to extend you a line of credit secured by your assets. That’s exactly what a HELOC is. If you want cash to put in a pool or take a trip and you, say, take out a HELOC instead of liquidating your 401k, you are “avoiding income taxes.”
I get that media and politicians want to turn this all into some scandal, but there isn’t a “different tax code” for billionaires. Debt is not income, and it’s not taxed as income, because you’re legally obligated to repay it. Ordinary Americans do the same exact thing these billionaires do every day.