Elon Musk – whose name sounds like an underarm deodorant is a whacko and sounds not too bright; rich yes; bright nope.
Listen to him in this short video clip from CNN Business during an interview at the Wall Street Journal's CEO Council Summit.
He suggests that Biden's “Build Back Better” bill must “be deleted, cancelled, not needed.” That bill BTW includes up to a $12,500 tax credit for electric vehicles (EV) and subsidies for EV charging stations. Musk does like that and said “Just delete it.”
The CNN article headline is this:
“Elon Musk doesn't want government
spending any more money on EV efforts”
The full related story is here along
with his cheap insult of Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA):
“Why
Musk will pay at least $7.6 billion in taxes this year”
Sen. Warren and Tesla CEO Elon Musk are in the middle of a full-scale Twitter war after she called the world's richest person a freeloader for paying $0 in income taxes in recent years.
So, why does he not pay any income tax since he is worth nearly $300 billion, according to Forbes' Real Time Billionaires estimate?
Background for Sen. Warren’s charge: An investigation by ProPublica in 2018 reported that Musk and other billionaires paid zero in taxes.
That year, Musk
had little in the way of taxable income, given that he sold no shares of his
stock and received no cash salary or bonus.
However, Musk will face a huge tax bill this year.
That fact he pointed out in his second Tweet to Sen. Warren saying: “If you opened your eyes for 2 seconds, you would realize I will pay more taxes than any American in history this year.”
Musk
has been exercising stock options he
was granted as his compensation in 2012, options that he vested as Tesla hit
some pre-arranged financial and operational targets over the following six
years. Those options are due to expire next year if he does not exercise them
by August.
Although Musk hasn't paid taxes on their value so far, he will have to pay up soon, and the tax bill will be substantial. That's because once he does exercise those options, the value of the shares he acquired, less the very nominal exercise price of $6.24 a share, counts as income.
Then his tax
bill on those shares will be at the top federal income tax rate of 37%, plus
another 3.8% net investment tax on top of that, and that all along with some
undetermined level of state income tax.
My 2 Cents: Simple the tax code must be changed to close millionaire and billionaire tax loopholes … they can spend millions or more on outer space while average Americans pay their taxes and most always on time, and seldom gripe like billionaire Elon Musk, who wants to spend billions by going to possibly settling Mars with some experimental colony.
I say, okay, do it and BTW stay there Mr. Musk all by your pitiful little lonesome self. Maybe the Mars IRS will honor you for settling that barren planet with a huge tax break like we do down here on little old shameful Earth, you think?
Related to all this: It's a different story when some of the wealthiest Americans fail to pay what they owe.
For example this from the New York Times and this from MSNBC:
“The wealthiest 1 percent of Americans are the nation's most egregious tax evaders, failing to pay as much as $163 billion in owed taxes per year, according to a Treasury Department report. Tax compliance rates are high for low- and middle-income workers who have their taxes deducted automatically from their paychecks. The rich, however, are able to use accounting loopholes to shield their tax liabilities.”
To put the figure in context, President Biden's Build Back Better proposal, currently pending on Capitol Hill, calls for roughly $350 billion in new investments, per year, over the course of the next decade.
The Treasury Department says that if the wealthiest of the wealthy paid their fair tax bills, it would cover nearly half of the cost of that legislation. But, the top wealthy seldom think about the nation as a whole, only just about their greedy selves, or so it seems.
So, just like the Capital One TV commercial says: “What's in your wallet?”
Thanks for stopping by.
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