Elon Musk is even richer now but has no plans to pay taxes

On Tuesday, Elon Musk made it clear again on Twitter what he thinks of the US government’s new tax plans, which want to tax large assets even if these assets are tied to other values. To a complaint tweet from Cardano entrepreneur Rick MacCracken, Musk replied:

“At some point they run out of other people’s money and then they come to you,” said Musk, a little annoyed. From the multi-billionaire’s point of view, the anger is understandable, because the billionaire tax proposed by the US Democrats would hit the ten richest US citizens hard.

the Washington Post had calculated that Musk alone would have to pay a total of around 50 billion US dollars in taxes over the first five years of taxation – and those were calculations before the recent wealth jump at Musk. The 50 billion therefore related to a fortune of almost 200 billion dollars. For the former Amazon boss Jeff Bezos, the Washington Post had calculated just under 44 billion in expected taxes.

On Thursday, Musk made it clear via Twitter what he was doing with his private assets the current Bloomberg billionaires list has passed the $ 300 billion mark, would much rather do than pay taxes on it.

“My plan is to use the money to bring mankind to Mars and to maintain the light of consciousness.” This rationale should cause some amusement to most tax officials around the world. Anyone who knows Musk, however, knows: He means serious. He really wants to make humanity a species that lives on multiple planets. The extremely successful serial founder has made this clear again and again over the past few years.

To Mathias Döpfner, the CEO of the Axel Springer Group, he had in an interview revealed last December that he wanted to spend as much money as possible on colonizing Mars. To do this, he sells his material possessions. After all, a city on Mars needs “a lot of resources,” said Musk Döpfner, and he intends to “contribute as much as possible to the city”. That means he just needs “a lot of capital”.

As early as May 2020, Musk via his favorite service Twitter state that he plans to sell “almost all physical possessions” and “not own a house.” He followed up on the announcement and had sold all but one of the houses in California’s Bay Area by late summer.

In addition to his interplanetary plans, Elon Musk is also skeptical that taxing the super-rich would have any positive effect on the general public.

“The US national debt is around $ 28,900 billion or about $ 229,000 per taxpayer,” argued Musk in a tweet on Wednesday. “Even if you were to tax all ‘billionaires’ at 100 percent, that would only make a small dent in that number, so of course the rest has to come from the general public. It’s simple math. ”The real problem would be the government’s spending policy.

Elon Musk will probably not have to worry about the tax plans. Because the billionaire taxation plans are already encountering resistance within the ranks of the Democratic Party itself.

Meanwhile, Musk’s wealth is growing rapidly. The announcement by the car rental company Hertz that it wanted to order up to 150,000 Teslas had given the stock a strong boost this week and pushed its personal fortune above the 300 billion dollar mark.

However, that should only be grist to the mill of his critics. Because they demand louder and louder that the multi-billionaire should also use his wealth to participate in solving earthly problems. With just six billion dollars of Musk’s fortune, we could save 42 million people from starvation, the head of the UN World Food Program, David Beasley, told CNN: “It’s not complicated.”

Others point out that the various Musk companies have grown in part at taxpayer costs, including grants, loans and government contracts in the billions. The NASA contract for the development of a lunar module alone had entered Musk’s SpaceX with a volume of 2.9 billion dollars. For the planned Tesla battery factory in Grünheide, Brandenburg, there is public funding of over 1.1 billion euros.

Musk would surely reply to this criticism that the achievement of interplanetarity is the best thing he could do for humanity – therefore charitable purposes drive his actions anyway. Typically, however, in democratic societies, representatives of the people decide on the use of taxpayers’ money, not the taxpayers themselves.