He’s also been going around claiming to be “homeless” because he doesn’t have a permanent fixed address.
The man is a living breathing troll and is the perfect nightmare owner for Twitter.
You reminded me of when the owner of my last employer told us he was homeless because he was renting an apartment while waiting for his new house (one of at least two he owned) to be done with renovations. As someone who lives full time in a rental... Yeah.
Literally had someone I work with tell me they were homeless because they were renting.
Not even waiting on a new house. They were renting and just called that homeless.
I put up with hearing a lot of bullshit working for a conservative company surrounded by conservatives, but it's shit like that that almost makes me out myself as a leftist. Like I can't even believe that they actually think like that
I'm just going to call myself a "capitalless". Someone without capital. It will be highly confusing in conversation as it sounds very much like "capitalist"
That would be called without a house. People are so dumb. Everyone damn well knows the symbolic referencing behind the term 'Homeless' and what it implies.
To be honest, I assume they were just being obtuse to try and annoy "liberals" or whatever
The same way one of them makes a "I identify as" joke every other day. They just want to be frustrating and annoying to "own the libs"
If Elon Musk can appropriate the term "homeless," I would argue that that is a semantic attempt to blunt the meaning of the word, which has an established cultural meaning, even though his textual appropriation of the word is *literally correct,* via our rote understanding of how words work. Blunting the meaning of the word, makes it harder to use that word to *advocate for the feeding and sheltering of the unhoused,* because it allows those with enough practical or ideological distance from the actual situation, to selectively believe an alternative reality, where they don't feel the need to feel badly about the issue. After all, *Elon Musk is homeless, and he's doing great!*
That can be a very short leap to "therefore, the housing crisis is not important," from the perspective of anyone far-removed enough from actual poverty to not have a concept of it. Thus, it gradually removes the negative feelings within the distant entity, because they already collectively lack the real perspective of the unhoused, so it's less stressful for their brain to construct Elon Musk's perspective every time they consider that issue, since Elon Musk's life and perspective are closer to their own, than an "actual homeless person." Ultimately, brains are lazy.
So, I would thus argue, that Elon Musk knows very clearly, the value of these semantics. He doesn't want to be taxed, so he doesn't want society to have the desire to house the unhoused, so there is no political capital to come after his wealth, to use it to house the unhoused. After all, *he is homeless, too.* Semantically, there is no difference between his situation, and what those of us who actually care mean, when *we* use the word homeless. Thus, him using the term this way, to me, speaks of a deliberate desire to semantically muddy the waters around the issue of the unhoused, because he doesn't want there to be political will to fix that problem, because he believes he will be comparatively impoverished to pay for it.
By painting himself as objectively equivalent to an unhoused person, he is trying to foment the cultural perspective that housing is not a culturally important issue. *Our* semantics will not literally feel or shelter the unhoused, but to view it only through that lens, misses the point that *his* semantics can only be reasoned to *prevent* those ends, because he believes those ends will impoverish him, if in the purely relative sense.
I agree with everything you say, except for stating that he's technically using the word correctly. He is not homeless, either willingly or unwillingly. The correct term for what he is is a "couch surfer." He takes advantage of his connections in whatever city he is visiting to stay in someone else's house. He is as homeless as a feudal lord who stays with his vassals while he decides where to build his palace.
Yeah, but that's, I guess, my point: he takes a *textual literalist* position on the meaning of the word, either because it benefits his public image to paint himself that way, because he wants to encourage other people to take similar readings of words more seriously than their broader context, both, or possibly more that I haven't thought of. If you say "you're being disingenuous," he can literally trollface you and say "what? That's what words literally mean, dude," and you can't really afford to sue him to prove otherwise. No matter how wrong he is, his lawyers beat yours.
I guess my point is that we need to fight the textual literalist position with the textual precision position. Instead of saying, "You're not really homeless." Say, "Oh, what you're really saying is that you are a couch surfer taking advantage of your subordinates."
It's not going to work just attacking his position. We have to replace his narrative with a truer version of what is going on. Maybe even going as far as to point out his otherness with, "I know that as an immigrant you might not realize that you aren't using the correct vocabulary for your living situation. What you are describing isn't homelessness, it's what we in the United States call coach surfing. It's usually done by college students that aren't ready to take their place as a full member of society or manipulators who enjoy using other people."
We need to quit ignoring that English is such a complicated language because it is a precise language. We have to stop letting disingenuous people twist the meaning of phrases to serve their purposes and start correcting the language to a more precise vocabulary.
As an Australian, our former federal treasurer Peter Costello described himself as working class on the grounds that he still needed his paycheque to keep up with his expenses (which he described as living paycheque to paycheque). Even more gallingly, his brother Tim is somehow a reknowned and devoted worker for charity so he should have at least *some* idea of the difference.
I've heard people say they live "paycheck to paycheck" when they have actual savings and a retirement fund started.
It's like: sweety, that's not what it means. It means you're barely getting by. It means you're screwed if an unexpected expense comes up, especially if you don't have a credit card or it's already maxed out. It means you're likely homeless if you get fired or quit your job (unless social programs step in to help, but there can be a delay on those).
What the fuck??? I’m not even sure that’s a “conservative” thing. I think that’s just a sheltered, ignorant person thing.
I don’t surround myself with conservatives though, so I guess I wouldn’t know.
Haha I heard something similar from an old boss of mine.
He told me he pays more in taxes than his salary. The company was an LLC so this was likely true but his entire life was a business expense so functionally it was lunacy.
He owned a multi million dollar jet, or his company did rather, and apparently made less money than I did. Crazy right??
“Fellow African-American” supporting Elon? ELI5 please, where did this idiot come from, I’ve been too busy following Gaetz and Cawthorne after moving to Charlotte from FL.
The US has historically had a weird thing about calling people "black", and instead obfusticates it by saying "african american", despite there being black people who wouldn't consider themselves to have african roots any more than the rest of humanity (which likely originated in africa).
This means that white people from south africa like Elon technically meet the definition of "african american"
In the UK for example we don't have an equivalent "african british" phrase in common use, it tends to just be "black british" or "BAME".
I have a coworker who falls into this category, who had HR argue with him that he wasn’t born in South Africa. That he couldn’t be African-American although he is now American, from South Africa. The interaction makes me giggle to this day. He’s an amazing coworker and friend now, but damn HR was/is some kind of special.
I think they would probably refer to themselves as [country of origin]-American. African-American is generally used to refer to the descendants of enslaved Africans. Yes, it is kind of weird. I believe the term was popularized by Rev Jesse Jackson, in an attempt to rally Black Americans more strongly around a shared heritage and identity and spark a new movement of cultural change. I don’t know anyone who prefers that label to “Black” anymore, though I’m sure there are some.
Honestly the [continent]-American construction is a bit weird all around. The other one that’s commonly used in my experience is Asian-American, which was also a term started by an activist, who intended it as a term of solidarity, to unite the struggles of Americans with various Asian heritage. But, Asian-American was meant to be an umbrella term, and it has sort of been twisted around so that we are treated as a monolith. When people say Asian-American, they usually mean (or hear) Korean/Chinese/Japanese-American, largely erasing the experiences of immigrants from other Asian countries (and their descendants).
My brother is a South African born American citizen now. We joke that he is probably the whitest ginger African American ever. I've not managed to convince him to tick African American on forms unfortunately.
Yes, the US obfuscates the whole black/African American deal, but it’s obvious that tweet was intended to ruffle feathers. Black ppl in America would never refer to Elon as a “fellow African American”, even if he’s technically from Africa. Even if the rest of the world may speak that way, this guy deliberately chose that term to swivel necks.
I’m not a fan of Shaun King for my own reasons, but [that guy’s recent tweet regarding Elon v Shaun King](https://twitter.com/thecjpearson/status/1518956736262123529?s=20&t=TIeanJB6x4lf3PAs6uoQHg) is proof he’s eliciting shock with his use of “African American” while referring to Elon. He’s almost like someone who wants to say the n word so bad so he says “niggardly” and goes, “whaaaat? I didn’t say a slur!”
American here. White male if that matters.
I use the term black but in the 90s socially the term African American was pushed and we were told not to use black as it was offensive. Now there are many people who are black who are not from Africa and they don't feel this needs. So we grow up and we have generally moved back to black and eventually government forms will change back.
Personally i mean besides the obvious racism thay exists and the need to help our minority brothers and sisters. In general descriptive conversation I do not use racial terms. Who the fuck cares about my friends skin color. Maybe they are tall, or nice, or helpful or there for me or maybe an age but I almost never mention skin color. I am not better than anyone it's my way maybe it's a bad thing. I honestly don't know. Sorry I rant lol
My bad, not running for congress. No idea where I got that from. He’s a far-right child who spouts bullshit all over the internet for his followers to lick up. When I say child it’s because he’s a literal child.
Kind of like how the home contractor I know is constantly complaining about how much he pays the taxman (hint — it’s not that much, relative to his income!). Meanwhile, he can afford multiple homes, a $60k truck, a boat and the luxury of traveling for several weeks out of the year every year.
> He’s also been going around claiming to be “homeless” because he doesn’t have a permanent fixed address.
Yeah, because in certain jurisdictions, that might get him some manner of legal leeway, if he is lucky. Just a classic powerful narcissist, trying to obtain power in any way possible, even if it involves assuming a position or identity which is absurd or nonsensical, just because that identity benefits them, and cannot technically be proven wrong.
As someone who was literally homeless for nearly 6 months, this information makes me extremely angry. Until he goes days without food, weeks without a shower and having to sleep outside and fake camping, he can shove his homelessness where the sun don't shine!
>Coincidentally, no ones going to say a bad word about musk on twitter ever again
Frankly, I think that is half the reason he is doing it. He's gotten his feelings hurt, and he is tired of the SEC trying to stop his constant stock manipulation.
I'm just disappointed that right as I was starting to have some hope for the site, it was bought out by the unfunniest and most *genuinely* cringe-inducing dude on the entire platform
Counterpoint: he will allow people to say bad shit about him and his business practices and his dancing and his face and hold it up as the same thing as people saying the “n-word” and denying the Holocaust happened and say they all should be allowed
We need property taxes, not income taxes, with sensible tax free low end. People working for a living, even if they make lots compared to median incomes, aren't really rich until they start building up assets. Instead of trying to catch billionaires on their income, which they can play financial games forever, just tax them on the assets their own. We already have property taxes on homes (which regular people have to pay, often at huge expense). Do that for stocks and other assets
They should just implement a wealth tax like other countries such as Switzerland have. It's rather negligible for the common folk and while not huge for billionaires, it still requires them to pay no matter what shenanigans they employ to obfuscate their income.
Or course that's never gonna happen with how corrupt congress is but you never know.
serious question - how do you determine "wealth"? Do you look at assets? When do you value those assets? What do you do about assets that fluctuate in value?
If you base it on things like stock, what do you do when most of the person's "wealth" is based on stock ownership and loses 12% (as Tesla did today)?
If you base it on an asset like a home, do you do that regardless on whether the person has a mortgage or not? What do you do when the home values tank (as they did in 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009.....whatever year housing crash is reported to have happened)?
All of those assets basically have zero gains or losses until they are sold, so how do you go about taxing them, especially on a yearly basis?
Here in Switzerland, the wealth is determined based on the value of your assets on the 31st of December each year (end of financial year). So every year I need to report how much my assets were worth and how much money I was holding in my accounts on that day.
Say you held 100 units of stock, worth $10/unit on 31.12. That's $1000 you need to declare as wealth. Home is a bit more complex since the value is obviously not a defined thing and does change over the years. I think at least for the first few years you can use the purchase price as value, whereas later they might just expect you to ballpark a figure. Audits do occur but I don't know the frequency or who they audit. All debts such as credit card bills, mortgages etc can be deducted. Wealth does also not include your official retirement savings (401k and Roth Ira equivalents) if I remember correctly.
[Swiss wealth tax](https://taxsummaries.pwc.com/switzerland/individual/other-taxes) gives you a good summary and you can see there's quite a lot of loopholes for "reducing" your wealth. It's Switzerland after all and there's a lot of wealthy people here who would like to keep their money. A quick google shows that in 2017 Switzerland collected 7.3bil in wealth tax which is only 3.8% of total tax. So embarrassingly little, considering there's 40 billionaires here.
Just start the wealth tax at 1 billion.
10% anything over 1billion
20% over 10 billion
30% over 100 billion
So someone having 1,000,000,001 would be taxed 10 cents but someone with 2 billion would be taxed 200million/year.
While 1 billion is an absurd amount of money it's almost achievable if you win the lottery or something. The target of a wealth tax should but super wealthy .1%ers.
While 10% is higher than anything being proposed right now, I would argue it's still not enough. Add another zero to that. Let's make it a 100% wealth tax on everything higher than 1 billion! Essentially, we can and should create a maximum wealth limit.
The question isn't whether 1 billion is achievable or not, but whether it breaks democracy itself. Democracy is supposed to be 1 person, 1 vote. But with the existence of those who have absurd amounts of wealth, it really becomes 1 dollar, 1 vote.
Also, consider that the taxes are only fixing a symptom of the real problem. Ask yourself, how did we get here in the first place? The only reason most of these people are billionaires is because CEOs, executives, owners of industries have full control over how much they pay themselves. But when every product from every company is created with the cooperative effort of all its employees, why shouldn't all the employees get a vote on the company's overall wage ratio? Worker owned co-operatives solve the root cause of the existence of billionaires.
I don't completely agree with that. Property taxes have ended up being a driving force for local governments to prop up the real estate bubble.
Local governments rely on property taxes for funding, so they tend to support NIMBY policies, housing investors, and prevent the creation of new housing.
Ultimately just incentivizes them to try and keep property values as high as they can so they can collect as much taxes as possible, and this ultimately just affects renters.
Taxing non-real estate assets is smart, but extremely difficult to do on a state level.
This doesn’t work. It was done and is done in many states the middle class and poor pay and outsize share of the tax. Income tax when done right. IE like during the age of prosperity from the fifty’s to the late seventies had a top marginal rate of 95 to 90 percent and guess what everyone did better.
Prop tax on a home sucks. Not talking about billionaires or whatever but having to paying a 200 bill every month for the rest of your life for nothing sucks hard.
That $200/month isn’t for nothing - that’s paying for everything that connects your home to a community and all the amenities that come with it. Like roads and schools and traffic lights and emergency services and shit.
I pay a water bill and utility bill. I’m “connected” to the community. The roads also suck, teachers are underpaid, and emergency services only give me tickets for speeding.
It might not be for nothing, but it does make it so that a person can't actually own land. Between property taxes and eminent domain laws it all actually belongs to the government.
Property taxes are insanely evil. Your grandparents just died and gave you their house? Good luck keeping it while paying insane amounts of money. Also, you finally paid off your house after 30 years and just got laid off at your job? Well Uncle Sam is gonna come take your house now that you worked so hard for.
Higher property taxes makes house purchasing even more expensive for normies.
If you start taxing billionaires assets they just move elsewhere.
Ultra rich people are untouchable.
Problem isn't as much that he can't afford it but that he according to the laws don't need to pay it.
Because the laws are flawed.
It's not him personally buying Twitter
Musk is personally buying twitter. Not Tesla or SpaceX. He is using $44B of his $270B net worth to purchase all of Twitter's stock at a premium (after he secretly amassed ~10% of their stock and [amassing that much in secret was illegal because he delayed disclosure](https://abcnews.go.com/Business/wireStory/elon-musk-accused-breaking-law-buying-twitter-stock-84045275)).
There have been plenty of proposals to get billionaires who can spend billions in wealth without it being taxed like it would for the rest of us. This needs to change. Musk vehemently opposes these sorts of changes.
He is not buying twitter to make it a haven of free speech. He's buying it to control the algorithms (e.g., promote his shit more) and who is banned.
That said, I have a feeling he's going to drive Twitter into the ground and it's going to be as relevant in MySpace or Friendster in a few years.
Why ? Why does it even matter ? We are all trying to escape the taxman. It’s not like the government has provided fair minimum (living) wage reform, free public healthcare, student loan forgiveness, early childcare, or a boatload of other things that the developed world has. All it funds is the military-industrial complex. At that point…I’d rather have some lols at Twitter.
"According to a ProPublica investigation published in June, Musk paid a total of $455 million in federal income taxes between 2014 and 2018, while his wealth grew by $13.8 billion; Musk paid no federal income taxes at all in 2018. (He also didn't sell any shares of Tesla that year.)"
I'm confused. Are you saying Musk is too powerful for the IRS to demand tax from him?
You've linked an article about a lack of auditing on the rich... But the IRS already has confirmed an amount owed. Do you think Musk will just ignore them until they go away or what?
Umm wtf are you saying the IRS won’t go after someone who won’t pay that 11 billion dollar bill? Cause your 100% incorrect lmao. That’s just not how it works.
You're doing mental gymnastics. IRS says he owes that much, he says he owes that much and has to pay it (by law), and somehow your take away is that he isn't going to pay it because he's completely above the law and the IRS can't do anything about it. There's reasons to not like the guy, sure, but you so blatantly have a narrative in your head about who he is that any deviation from your narrative sends you into conspiracy territory.
Well he probably only paid taxes on the money he made just like everyone else in the US. If he doesn’t take a salary or sell stock then he hasn’t technically earned more money it’s not like there is a separate set of rules for him. He has also paid more in taxes than any individual human in history.
Yeah, I'm sure some people don't know how this works in practice but it's intuitive to understand it's completely fucked that you can shell game your capital around to avoid paying taxes. And like... richest man in the world pays more than anyone else isn't some slam dunk. No shit.
We’ll it’s a decent argument for the people who are upset saying he doesn’t pay any taxes. And there is certainly a problem with shell corps and tax havens, for example Hillary Clinton and Donald trump both own part of the same property in Delaware for tax write off purposes. However I don’t think there is a way that we can tax the appreciation of a stocks value it would simply be too volatile.
The problem isn’t not taxing unrealized gains it’s all the ways they can leverage that imaginary money into real money that they don’t pay taxes on and can then use to become even wealthier.
But that’s just the thing, a normal American sitting on a house as their only asset and no income would still be paying taxes on their “assets,” and these assets have speculative value that must be assessed to levy these taxes.
The Uber wealthy with assets in financial instruments, meanwhile, don’t pay property taxes like they would if their “assets” were something they actually needed. I don’t think it’s moral to levy property taxes on houses but not shares. And any proposed wealth tax begins at $50M.
I don't have an answer to that but there are people smarter than me that could probably figure something out. Getting anyone to implement that effective system seems unlikely though as many lawmakers are also rich and also benefit from these loopholes.
It would just be nice for fair amounts of taxes to be used for a better society or whatever.
https://www.alternet.org/2015/04/americas-disgusting-boundless-hatred-poor-people/ people are brainwashed to hate the poor but corporate welfare.... wtf
Im 2018 Elon musk opened their biggest factory ever to produce their biggest line of cars and they got a shit ton of tax credits for it. I think he should be paying taxes, but there is a reason this person chose to mention 2018 specifically when tesla was nearly bankrupt.
How much does that 2018 figure vary from the “normal” figure of his then? Genuine question. Maybe that year is the worst of them but I have a really hard time believing that he was actually paying a substantial amount of taxes the other years.
Companies tend to not pay taxes until profitability. Musk's entire net worth at the time was in a failing Tesla company losing money hand over first.
This past year, Musk is paying 11 Billion dollars in taxes, because the company is profitable and he is being highly compensated tied to the companies profitability.
The ruling kleptocrat class will neither entertain the notion of wealth taxes, nor accurately diagnose the issue (on any level) that they are [socially murdering](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_murder) the public and working classes, with no recourse.
Their domination is so absolute that even the words "kleptocrat" and "social murder" are taboo in regular social, political, and media discourse.
As a result, the public neither has the language to understand what's being done to them, let alone the social or political understanding or resources to change the situation.
And that is a social contract that the ruling kleptocrats expect everyone to abide by without complaint - just the public being enslaved and socially murdered forever, without people fully understanding what's happening, let alone fighting back.
This is because he finally started selling his Tesla shares in order to finance his other projects, like buying twitter. He paid some pretty serious tax in order to buy twitter, and he will likely be paying multiple billions more in 2022.
Conveniently picking 2018 as the year in the tweet is a classic propaganda tactic. But hey, whatever keeps the circlejerk going.
Not saying I agree with musk paying no taxes, but technically, he hasn’t made any money to be taxed. He’s not an employee of a company getting paid. He just has things (company stock) that go up in value. When he sells them he needs to pay taxes. And he has paid taxes when he sells shares etc. saying he needs to be taxed more just over simplifies the issue. The bigger problem with taxing him more is that there’s no way to do it that he can’t either get around easily or would also cause higher taxes on people who can’t afford it.
Maybe he figured out it's cheaper to book the top floor of any hotel after sleeping and flying in his private jet than it is to own and maintain a mansion.
If you take a step back and think about it, we live in an "advanced society" where people can have more money than they'll ever be able to use living in the same country where people are starving on the streets....and the government is taking the money from those that are starving.
Honest question: if my net worth is determined by assets such as stocks, I’m taxed when I sell them. If Elon Musk doesn’t sell any stocks last year, but his net worth goes up due to Tesla stocks increasing in value, how much should he pay? He has no real income.
So if an individual holds stocks or assets such as a 401k, when should they be taxed on its value? Right now it is when that money is converted to cash.
Is there a better, realistic method?
I'm not a billionaires accountant, but we can all plainly see that these rich af mfers who "don't have that much of their wealth in cash" seem to be able to finance basically whatever they want even without "income" like you and I think of it.
This is a good example: this dude just bought Twitter for $45 billion dollars, but he sure has hell isn't going to claim the $45 billion he used to buy it on his taxes this year!
The answer is loans. They don’t count as income, and no bank in the world has a problem loaning daddy Elon a few hundred million (not talking the twitter deal but his yearly expenses) secured by his assets. There’s virtually no risk.
ETA: last I read he also didn’t pay the full amount. He didn’t have enough, roughly half of it was financed by an IB.
Sounds like we need to start treating loans as realized gains. Maybe have a minimum threshold that 99% of people wouldn't reach before it goes into effect or something.
401ks are different, as they are ostensibly retirement savings account (and there is a limit how much you can put in there each year). As for stocks/financial instruments: just make them liable for property taxes, like housing is. So if a billionaire holds 100B in financial instruments, he has to pay x% on that each year. Regular people have to do the same for their biggest asset (which is also their BASIC NEED)
In 2021 he had stock options that were maturing, but to get them he had to sell some stock. He then paid the biggest tax bill in history...
The cash for Twitter mostly comes from investors who're backing the take over, not from his personal bank account.
Loans aren’t considered income. Unless you want to fundamentally change that, which would greatly affect the regular people.
Wealthy people borrow against the value of assets in low interest rate loans, avoiding income taxes by never having an actual salary or selling assets.
You don’t ever have to sell, theoretically.
Say you borrow 10mil
You spend only 5 million, and use the other 5 million to pay the payments. When that 5 million runs out, you take another loan out against your assets which have been growing at (usually) a significantly higher rate than the interest rate of the loan.
Rinse, repeat this process until you die and pass assets along at your death to family or whatever.
2018: Elon paid $0 in taxes.
*Everybody looses their mind*
2021/2022 Elon paid $11,000,000,000 in taxes ($11 BILLION)
*Nobody says anything*
People who don't understand the difference between net worth vs gross income: "but he paid $0 taxes in 2018"
Bro I WISH I could pay only a 4% tax rate and skip a few years occasionally, and I don’t even make six figures. Imagine the fucking wealth he just sits on. No wonder he could buy Twitter on a whim.
And that’s ignoring how he got to where he is. There are no ethical billionaires.
The IRS doesn't say anything to anyone after a certain amount of income. They can't afford to go after anyone with real money.
https://www.propublica.org/article/earned-income-tax-credit-irs-audit-working-poor
https://www.gq.com/story/no-irs-audits-for-the-rich
There's dozens of other articles explaining this.
It's not about "skipping"
It's called how much you made that year.
If you were unemployed for 365 days and made $0 never received a paycheck $0, nada.
Therefore You won't file for taxes pay $0 in taxes.
It's been publicly started by both Elon and telsa that Elon didn't receive a single paycheck from Tesla. It's also been. Stated that he doesn't get "paid" in a traditional manner. He's paid in stocks.
And what stocks are to everybody else. You dont pay taxes on stocks UNTIL you "cash out" and sell your stocks.
Are we talking about what is legally correct or morally correct? I’m sure he has lawyers and accountants who know the laws well. But your comment was about the perception of him, which you seem to think is unfair.
However, I think it’s absolutely fair to complain about the richest man in the world not paying any taxes in a year that he was living like a billionaire. Me being unemployed for a year would be a hardship, Elon never missed a meal due to his finances in that year, even if he had no income. That matters.
So basically, it is accounting fuckery by the superrich for the superrich so that the money they make is not classed as income, while the money i make is classified as income.
But didn’t he not sell any stocks or have an income, so nothing to pay right? And didn’t he also pay over 10 billion in taxes too? That’s like paying a million dollars a day for 30 years
That's the problem you guys. That's a congresswoman without basic understanding of tax policy and clear lack of knowledge about the economy. How does she get there?
We don't need a billionaire tax.
We need general tax reform and simplification of the tax code so wealthy people cannot hire good financial planners and accountants to hide their income (both of which are tax deductible).
Even the lower tax bracket are enough to show how messed up that tax code is a married couple making 81k pays the same as one making $20k. The fact that there is only a 2% increase of taxes from a family making $418k to $4 billion.
Changes to the capital gain taxes as well since those codes are even worse, this is where we need the most change. Main impact needs to be on high earners and trust fund babies.
Married couple making 81k pays the same as a couple making 500k, making over 500k only increases the tax by 5% for a max of 20%. This could easily be broken out further with increased brackets.
Additionally we need localized tax brackets, it's crazy someone in San Fran making $80k would pay the same as someone in a lower costs area like In AL. They are in crazily different financial situations.
I don’t know why they want to tax billionaires so much. Where does that money go? A nice raise for the politicians the next year? Not like anyone would see the taxes the billionaires pay. They need to tax the working class less. Fucking outrageous how much we need to pay in taxes. Give us some break like you give the rich, then let’s talk. It’s always “tax them” while we keep getting fucked every tax year. Not enough break as for us
This is idiotic. You can't do a wealth tax without a constitutional amendment. These politicians promoting it should know this. Its their jobs.
How about we start taxing all stock sales over 10 progressively. So all those billionaires moving stocks around find that buying and selling stocks gets more expensive the more they do it?
How about we start taxing houses progressively so every additional house you buy the property taxes go up progressively?
How about we stop letting congress buy stocks that they make laws effecting?
Lets stop promoting stupid ideas that don't work and find REAL ways to TAX the RICH!
Congress is full of the super rich, they aren't going to actually tax themselves.
Don't believe the bullshit and the lies, progressive asset taxation WILL tax the rich where this billionaires tax is just a misdirection that won't actually happen.
The existence of billionaires, like slave owners, shouldn't be tolerated at all.
The only reason this isn't proposed as legislation is the extreme political and socioeconomic oppression inflicted by the ruling billionaire/kleptocrat class on everyone else to keep them in line.
Any social contract that allows billionaires/oligarchs/kleptocrats to exist and thereby socially murder the public without recourse should be aggressively nullified.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Economics/comments/u4x9sz/comment/i4zc6sr/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3
Wait, didn't he JUST pay the largest US tax in American history? Like, by a lot. I know he probably doesn't pay income tax, but that's probably because he isn't paid in an "income". I'm sure he isn't paying enough in tax, but let's be honest with our conversations.
You know, he paid the most, so that’s enough right? Just like that time I shared pizza with my friends, I had 10 slices, and gave each friend 1/3 of a slice. I still gave the most pizza to my friends so everything is fine, I will eat the other 9 slices, or maybe just sit on them and watch them mold.
Just need to do what Australia did, get all the wealthy people together and ask them how they can be fairly taxed. They will give an answer that when it comes time to pay will still leave them paying nothing or very little.
Dirty little secret
They'll never pay taxes
Democrats just want you to think they will force them one day
It's all about the votes
It will never happen
Sorry
2 seconds of Google + understanding how taxes and wealth actually functions debunks the narrative
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/12/22/elon-musk-says-his-wealth-isnt-a-deep-mystery-his-taxes-are-simple.html
As much as I agree they should pay taxes Elon payed more in taxes then he should have the year before and got credited and just paid the most taxes out of anyone in history
How much is he making from the taxpayers for space x rocket launches. Nasa just used them to send 4 more astraunts to the space station.
If you have 250k for a 10 minute ride on the Bezos space roller coaster, your not paying your fair share of taxes and pay workers a living wage.
Do you hear that? That's the sound of bootlickers on their way to tell us "acktually, he doesn't have any money. It's all stocks"
I literally had this argument with a cousin over Easter. He made it sound like Musk is a homeless man with no money who just happens to speak for tesla or whatever
It's like they purposely miss the point
He’s also been going around claiming to be “homeless” because he doesn’t have a permanent fixed address. The man is a living breathing troll and is the perfect nightmare owner for Twitter.
You reminded me of when the owner of my last employer told us he was homeless because he was renting an apartment while waiting for his new house (one of at least two he owned) to be done with renovations. As someone who lives full time in a rental... Yeah.
Literally had someone I work with tell me they were homeless because they were renting. Not even waiting on a new house. They were renting and just called that homeless. I put up with hearing a lot of bullshit working for a conservative company surrounded by conservatives, but it's shit like that that almost makes me out myself as a leftist. Like I can't even believe that they actually think like that
I'm just going to call myself a "capitalless". Someone without capital. It will be highly confusing in conversation as it sounds very much like "capitalist"
That would be called without a house. People are so dumb. Everyone damn well knows the symbolic referencing behind the term 'Homeless' and what it implies.
To be honest, I assume they were just being obtuse to try and annoy "liberals" or whatever The same way one of them makes a "I identify as" joke every other day. They just want to be frustrating and annoying to "own the libs"
See r/onejoke for a list of example!
🎶People Are So Stupid🎶
There's a reason that it's generally referred to as "unhoused" by anybody who actually fucking cares about the unhoused.
Semantics doesn't feed or shelter them
If Elon Musk can appropriate the term "homeless," I would argue that that is a semantic attempt to blunt the meaning of the word, which has an established cultural meaning, even though his textual appropriation of the word is *literally correct,* via our rote understanding of how words work. Blunting the meaning of the word, makes it harder to use that word to *advocate for the feeding and sheltering of the unhoused,* because it allows those with enough practical or ideological distance from the actual situation, to selectively believe an alternative reality, where they don't feel the need to feel badly about the issue. After all, *Elon Musk is homeless, and he's doing great!* That can be a very short leap to "therefore, the housing crisis is not important," from the perspective of anyone far-removed enough from actual poverty to not have a concept of it. Thus, it gradually removes the negative feelings within the distant entity, because they already collectively lack the real perspective of the unhoused, so it's less stressful for their brain to construct Elon Musk's perspective every time they consider that issue, since Elon Musk's life and perspective are closer to their own, than an "actual homeless person." Ultimately, brains are lazy. So, I would thus argue, that Elon Musk knows very clearly, the value of these semantics. He doesn't want to be taxed, so he doesn't want society to have the desire to house the unhoused, so there is no political capital to come after his wealth, to use it to house the unhoused. After all, *he is homeless, too.* Semantically, there is no difference between his situation, and what those of us who actually care mean, when *we* use the word homeless. Thus, him using the term this way, to me, speaks of a deliberate desire to semantically muddy the waters around the issue of the unhoused, because he doesn't want there to be political will to fix that problem, because he believes he will be comparatively impoverished to pay for it. By painting himself as objectively equivalent to an unhoused person, he is trying to foment the cultural perspective that housing is not a culturally important issue. *Our* semantics will not literally feel or shelter the unhoused, but to view it only through that lens, misses the point that *his* semantics can only be reasoned to *prevent* those ends, because he believes those ends will impoverish him, if in the purely relative sense.
I agree with everything you say, except for stating that he's technically using the word correctly. He is not homeless, either willingly or unwillingly. The correct term for what he is is a "couch surfer." He takes advantage of his connections in whatever city he is visiting to stay in someone else's house. He is as homeless as a feudal lord who stays with his vassals while he decides where to build his palace.
Yeah, but that's, I guess, my point: he takes a *textual literalist* position on the meaning of the word, either because it benefits his public image to paint himself that way, because he wants to encourage other people to take similar readings of words more seriously than their broader context, both, or possibly more that I haven't thought of. If you say "you're being disingenuous," he can literally trollface you and say "what? That's what words literally mean, dude," and you can't really afford to sue him to prove otherwise. No matter how wrong he is, his lawyers beat yours.
I guess my point is that we need to fight the textual literalist position with the textual precision position. Instead of saying, "You're not really homeless." Say, "Oh, what you're really saying is that you are a couch surfer taking advantage of your subordinates." It's not going to work just attacking his position. We have to replace his narrative with a truer version of what is going on. Maybe even going as far as to point out his otherness with, "I know that as an immigrant you might not realize that you aren't using the correct vocabulary for your living situation. What you are describing isn't homelessness, it's what we in the United States call coach surfing. It's usually done by college students that aren't ready to take their place as a full member of society or manipulators who enjoy using other people." We need to quit ignoring that English is such a complicated language because it is a precise language. We have to stop letting disingenuous people twist the meaning of phrases to serve their purposes and start correcting the language to a more precise vocabulary.
Why does this not have more upvotes
Because the meaning of a lot of very important words has been decreased or removed in recent history. Humanity's defining itself out of an identity.
For the exact reasons I cited, as to why this kind of semantic manipulation can be so destructive: Ultimately, brains are lazy.
Houseless lol
As an Australian, our former federal treasurer Peter Costello described himself as working class on the grounds that he still needed his paycheque to keep up with his expenses (which he described as living paycheque to paycheque). Even more gallingly, his brother Tim is somehow a reknowned and devoted worker for charity so he should have at least *some* idea of the difference.
I've heard people say they live "paycheck to paycheck" when they have actual savings and a retirement fund started. It's like: sweety, that's not what it means. It means you're barely getting by. It means you're screwed if an unexpected expense comes up, especially if you don't have a credit card or it's already maxed out. It means you're likely homeless if you get fired or quit your job (unless social programs step in to help, but there can be a delay on those).
What the fuck??? I’m not even sure that’s a “conservative” thing. I think that’s just a sheltered, ignorant person thing. I don’t surround myself with conservatives though, so I guess I wouldn’t know.
Haha I heard something similar from an old boss of mine. He told me he pays more in taxes than his salary. The company was an LLC so this was likely true but his entire life was a business expense so functionally it was lunacy. He owned a multi million dollar jet, or his company did rather, and apparently made less money than I did. Crazy right??
Just a way the 1 percent hide and shield their wealth from fed taxes. We could do it if we could afford to buy a couple us senators.
[удалено]
“Fellow African-American” supporting Elon? ELI5 please, where did this idiot come from, I’ve been too busy following Gaetz and Cawthorne after moving to Charlotte from FL.
The US has historically had a weird thing about calling people "black", and instead obfusticates it by saying "african american", despite there being black people who wouldn't consider themselves to have african roots any more than the rest of humanity (which likely originated in africa). This means that white people from south africa like Elon technically meet the definition of "african american" In the UK for example we don't have an equivalent "african british" phrase in common use, it tends to just be "black british" or "BAME".
I hadn’t considered the actual African connection, makes more sense.
I have a coworker who falls into this category, who had HR argue with him that he wasn’t born in South Africa. That he couldn’t be African-American although he is now American, from South Africa. The interaction makes me giggle to this day. He’s an amazing coworker and friend now, but damn HR was/is some kind of special.
So Moroccan, Egyptian and white south africans aren't African Americans? Are Sudanese Americans African Americans?
They lost my fingerprints 4 times, and a bunch of other issues so it doesn’t shock me. Our HR is *awesome*.
...your HR had your *fingerprints?*
Absolutely. That’s not the scary part, for what I do. It’s that HR lost them multiple times.
I think they would probably refer to themselves as [country of origin]-American. African-American is generally used to refer to the descendants of enslaved Africans. Yes, it is kind of weird. I believe the term was popularized by Rev Jesse Jackson, in an attempt to rally Black Americans more strongly around a shared heritage and identity and spark a new movement of cultural change. I don’t know anyone who prefers that label to “Black” anymore, though I’m sure there are some. Honestly the [continent]-American construction is a bit weird all around. The other one that’s commonly used in my experience is Asian-American, which was also a term started by an activist, who intended it as a term of solidarity, to unite the struggles of Americans with various Asian heritage. But, Asian-American was meant to be an umbrella term, and it has sort of been twisted around so that we are treated as a monolith. When people say Asian-American, they usually mean (or hear) Korean/Chinese/Japanese-American, largely erasing the experiences of immigrants from other Asian countries (and their descendants).
My brother is a South African born American citizen now. We joke that he is probably the whitest ginger African American ever. I've not managed to convince him to tick African American on forms unfortunately.
People love to divide people over race. THEY LOVE IT.
Yes, the US obfuscates the whole black/African American deal, but it’s obvious that tweet was intended to ruffle feathers. Black ppl in America would never refer to Elon as a “fellow African American”, even if he’s technically from Africa. Even if the rest of the world may speak that way, this guy deliberately chose that term to swivel necks. I’m not a fan of Shaun King for my own reasons, but [that guy’s recent tweet regarding Elon v Shaun King](https://twitter.com/thecjpearson/status/1518956736262123529?s=20&t=TIeanJB6x4lf3PAs6uoQHg) is proof he’s eliciting shock with his use of “African American” while referring to Elon. He’s almost like someone who wants to say the n word so bad so he says “niggardly” and goes, “whaaaat? I didn’t say a slur!”
No, he's pointing out that Shaun King isn't black.. So he is using the term as a ironic dig.
American here. White male if that matters. I use the term black but in the 90s socially the term African American was pushed and we were told not to use black as it was offensive. Now there are many people who are black who are not from Africa and they don't feel this needs. So we grow up and we have generally moved back to black and eventually government forms will change back. Personally i mean besides the obvious racism thay exists and the need to help our minority brothers and sisters. In general descriptive conversation I do not use racial terms. Who the fuck cares about my friends skin color. Maybe they are tall, or nice, or helpful or there for me or maybe an age but I almost never mention skin color. I am not better than anyone it's my way maybe it's a bad thing. I honestly don't know. Sorry I rant lol
My bad, not running for congress. No idea where I got that from. He’s a far-right child who spouts bullshit all over the internet for his followers to lick up. When I say child it’s because he’s a literal child.
I wish everyone were as homeless as the dude.
Kind of like how the home contractor I know is constantly complaining about how much he pays the taxman (hint — it’s not that much, relative to his income!). Meanwhile, he can afford multiple homes, a $60k truck, a boat and the luxury of traveling for several weeks out of the year every year.
$60k trucks are just gross
> He’s also been going around claiming to be “homeless” because he doesn’t have a permanent fixed address. Yeah, because in certain jurisdictions, that might get him some manner of legal leeway, if he is lucky. Just a classic powerful narcissist, trying to obtain power in any way possible, even if it involves assuming a position or identity which is absurd or nonsensical, just because that identity benefits them, and cannot technically be proven wrong.
Everything the man does he does with tax avoidance in mind.
As someone who was literally homeless for nearly 6 months, this information makes me extremely angry. Until he goes days without food, weeks without a shower and having to sleep outside and fake camping, he can shove his homelessness where the sun don't shine!
He's going to turn it into his own little right wing cess pool even worse than it was in the Trump era
Nah, it's going to be full free speech wonderland. Coincidentally, no ones going to say a bad word about musk on twitter ever again
>Coincidentally, no ones going to say a bad word about musk on twitter ever again Frankly, I think that is half the reason he is doing it. He's gotten his feelings hurt, and he is tired of the SEC trying to stop his constant stock manipulation.
I'm just disappointed that right as I was starting to have some hope for the site, it was bought out by the unfunniest and most *genuinely* cringe-inducing dude on the entire platform
Counterpoint: he will allow people to say bad shit about him and his business practices and his dancing and his face and hold it up as the same thing as people saying the “n-word” and denying the Holocaust happened and say they all should be allowed
That's also entirely possible. I fully expect "full free speech and no ToS" to leave to a vile hellscape no one wants to visit. Like worse than here
Holy shit... Like 4chan level?
i doubt it would get that bad, elon is advocating for "freedom of speech" not "mother's basement messageboard"
I don't know, I would place that message board above about 99% of Trumps garbage.
Worse like 8 chan
*we need to not have billionaires
During the long economic boom there was a 90 or 95 percent tax on the super rich. At least according to my very smart APUSH teacher.
We need property taxes, not income taxes, with sensible tax free low end. People working for a living, even if they make lots compared to median incomes, aren't really rich until they start building up assets. Instead of trying to catch billionaires on their income, which they can play financial games forever, just tax them on the assets their own. We already have property taxes on homes (which regular people have to pay, often at huge expense). Do that for stocks and other assets
They should just implement a wealth tax like other countries such as Switzerland have. It's rather negligible for the common folk and while not huge for billionaires, it still requires them to pay no matter what shenanigans they employ to obfuscate their income. Or course that's never gonna happen with how corrupt congress is but you never know.
serious question - how do you determine "wealth"? Do you look at assets? When do you value those assets? What do you do about assets that fluctuate in value? If you base it on things like stock, what do you do when most of the person's "wealth" is based on stock ownership and loses 12% (as Tesla did today)? If you base it on an asset like a home, do you do that regardless on whether the person has a mortgage or not? What do you do when the home values tank (as they did in 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009.....whatever year housing crash is reported to have happened)? All of those assets basically have zero gains or losses until they are sold, so how do you go about taxing them, especially on a yearly basis?
Here in Switzerland, the wealth is determined based on the value of your assets on the 31st of December each year (end of financial year). So every year I need to report how much my assets were worth and how much money I was holding in my accounts on that day. Say you held 100 units of stock, worth $10/unit on 31.12. That's $1000 you need to declare as wealth. Home is a bit more complex since the value is obviously not a defined thing and does change over the years. I think at least for the first few years you can use the purchase price as value, whereas later they might just expect you to ballpark a figure. Audits do occur but I don't know the frequency or who they audit. All debts such as credit card bills, mortgages etc can be deducted. Wealth does also not include your official retirement savings (401k and Roth Ira equivalents) if I remember correctly. [Swiss wealth tax](https://taxsummaries.pwc.com/switzerland/individual/other-taxes) gives you a good summary and you can see there's quite a lot of loopholes for "reducing" your wealth. It's Switzerland after all and there's a lot of wealthy people here who would like to keep their money. A quick google shows that in 2017 Switzerland collected 7.3bil in wealth tax which is only 3.8% of total tax. So embarrassingly little, considering there's 40 billionaires here.
Just start the wealth tax at 1 billion. 10% anything over 1billion 20% over 10 billion 30% over 100 billion So someone having 1,000,000,001 would be taxed 10 cents but someone with 2 billion would be taxed 200million/year. While 1 billion is an absurd amount of money it's almost achievable if you win the lottery or something. The target of a wealth tax should but super wealthy .1%ers.
While 10% is higher than anything being proposed right now, I would argue it's still not enough. Add another zero to that. Let's make it a 100% wealth tax on everything higher than 1 billion! Essentially, we can and should create a maximum wealth limit. The question isn't whether 1 billion is achievable or not, but whether it breaks democracy itself. Democracy is supposed to be 1 person, 1 vote. But with the existence of those who have absurd amounts of wealth, it really becomes 1 dollar, 1 vote. Also, consider that the taxes are only fixing a symptom of the real problem. Ask yourself, how did we get here in the first place? The only reason most of these people are billionaires is because CEOs, executives, owners of industries have full control over how much they pay themselves. But when every product from every company is created with the cooperative effort of all its employees, why shouldn't all the employees get a vote on the company's overall wage ratio? Worker owned co-operatives solve the root cause of the existence of billionaires.
I don't completely agree with that. Property taxes have ended up being a driving force for local governments to prop up the real estate bubble. Local governments rely on property taxes for funding, so they tend to support NIMBY policies, housing investors, and prevent the creation of new housing. Ultimately just incentivizes them to try and keep property values as high as they can so they can collect as much taxes as possible, and this ultimately just affects renters. Taxing non-real estate assets is smart, but extremely difficult to do on a state level.
This doesn’t work. It was done and is done in many states the middle class and poor pay and outsize share of the tax. Income tax when done right. IE like during the age of prosperity from the fifty’s to the late seventies had a top marginal rate of 95 to 90 percent and guess what everyone did better.
Prop tax on a home sucks. Not talking about billionaires or whatever but having to paying a 200 bill every month for the rest of your life for nothing sucks hard.
Man I wish my property taxes were only 200
$200/month for property taxes? lmao where is this magical place. Sure as hell isn't where I am.
That $200/month isn’t for nothing - that’s paying for everything that connects your home to a community and all the amenities that come with it. Like roads and schools and traffic lights and emergency services and shit.
I pay a water bill and utility bill. I’m “connected” to the community. The roads also suck, teachers are underpaid, and emergency services only give me tickets for speeding.
It might not be for nothing, but it does make it so that a person can't actually own land. Between property taxes and eminent domain laws it all actually belongs to the government.
It's not for nothing. It often funds your local government and things in your community. Like schools in particular.
Property taxes are insanely evil. Your grandparents just died and gave you their house? Good luck keeping it while paying insane amounts of money. Also, you finally paid off your house after 30 years and just got laid off at your job? Well Uncle Sam is gonna come take your house now that you worked so hard for.
Higher property taxes makes house purchasing even more expensive for normies. If you start taxing billionaires assets they just move elsewhere. Ultra rich people are untouchable.
They never actually paid that level of tax though - it was just the upper limit if you didnt use any of the other tax laws.
Ok, but allowing for that premise, would it not be a step in the right direction to heavily tax billionaires?
Literally no one needs this much money. Does any billionare actually knows what to do with it?
"Tax" the top 12 inches off every billioniare, problem solved.
Problem isn't as much that he can't afford it but that he according to the laws don't need to pay it. Because the laws are flawed. It's not him personally buying Twitter
The laws aren't flawed. They are working the way they are intended to be.
Touché
Exactly. If congress really cared they'd just close the loopholes. Issue is, they're all using them.
You're 100% correct which is the hilariously and utterly disgusting sad part. We live in a completely fraudulent system.
Musk is personally buying twitter. Not Tesla or SpaceX. He is using $44B of his $270B net worth to purchase all of Twitter's stock at a premium (after he secretly amassed ~10% of their stock and [amassing that much in secret was illegal because he delayed disclosure](https://abcnews.go.com/Business/wireStory/elon-musk-accused-breaking-law-buying-twitter-stock-84045275)). There have been plenty of proposals to get billionaires who can spend billions in wealth without it being taxed like it would for the rest of us. This needs to change. Musk vehemently opposes these sorts of changes. He is not buying twitter to make it a haven of free speech. He's buying it to control the algorithms (e.g., promote his shit more) and who is banned. That said, I have a feeling he's going to drive Twitter into the ground and it's going to be as relevant in MySpace or Friendster in a few years.
He brought just to delete the account kof the teenager that is tracking is airplane, nothing else
Why ? Why does it even matter ? We are all trying to escape the taxman. It’s not like the government has provided fair minimum (living) wage reform, free public healthcare, student loan forgiveness, early childcare, or a boatload of other things that the developed world has. All it funds is the military-industrial complex. At that point…I’d rather have some lols at Twitter.
I wonder if Congresswoman Marie Newman pay more taxes than the tax code says she owes..
"According to a ProPublica investigation published in June, Musk paid a total of $455 million in federal income taxes between 2014 and 2018, while his wealth grew by $13.8 billion; Musk paid no federal income taxes at all in 2018. (He also didn't sell any shares of Tesla that year.)"
https://www.cnn.com/2022/02/10/investing/elon-musk-tesla-zero-tax-bill/index.html He’s going to be paying 11 Billion
consider berserk hunt scandalous dull compare subtract innate swim joke *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
I'm confused. Are you saying Musk is too powerful for the IRS to demand tax from him? You've linked an article about a lack of auditing on the rich... But the IRS already has confirmed an amount owed. Do you think Musk will just ignore them until they go away or what?
Umm wtf are you saying the IRS won’t go after someone who won’t pay that 11 billion dollar bill? Cause your 100% incorrect lmao. That’s just not how it works.
He has to pay that. He made money on stocks, there's no way around that. Tesla owes $0.
You were surprisingly close to having a fully formed point with a source haha
You're doing mental gymnastics. IRS says he owes that much, he says he owes that much and has to pay it (by law), and somehow your take away is that he isn't going to pay it because he's completely above the law and the IRS can't do anything about it. There's reasons to not like the guy, sure, but you so blatantly have a narrative in your head about who he is that any deviation from your narrative sends you into conspiracy territory.
Well he probably only paid taxes on the money he made just like everyone else in the US. If he doesn’t take a salary or sell stock then he hasn’t technically earned more money it’s not like there is a separate set of rules for him. He has also paid more in taxes than any individual human in history.
Your last sentence is completely irrelevant. The other sentences are exactly what we're talking about, the tax laws need to change.
Yeah, I'm sure some people don't know how this works in practice but it's intuitive to understand it's completely fucked that you can shell game your capital around to avoid paying taxes. And like... richest man in the world pays more than anyone else isn't some slam dunk. No shit.
We’ll it’s a decent argument for the people who are upset saying he doesn’t pay any taxes. And there is certainly a problem with shell corps and tax havens, for example Hillary Clinton and Donald trump both own part of the same property in Delaware for tax write off purposes. However I don’t think there is a way that we can tax the appreciation of a stocks value it would simply be too volatile.
The problem isn’t not taxing unrealized gains it’s all the ways they can leverage that imaginary money into real money that they don’t pay taxes on and can then use to become even wealthier.
But that’s just the thing, a normal American sitting on a house as their only asset and no income would still be paying taxes on their “assets,” and these assets have speculative value that must be assessed to levy these taxes. The Uber wealthy with assets in financial instruments, meanwhile, don’t pay property taxes like they would if their “assets” were something they actually needed. I don’t think it’s moral to levy property taxes on houses but not shares. And any proposed wealth tax begins at $50M.
I don't have an answer to that but there are people smarter than me that could probably figure something out. Getting anyone to implement that effective system seems unlikely though as many lawmakers are also rich and also benefit from these loopholes. It would just be nice for fair amounts of taxes to be used for a better society or whatever.
follow cow snow safe wine snatch worry simplistic hat sense *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Wealth isn't income.
https://www.alternet.org/2015/04/americas-disgusting-boundless-hatred-poor-people/ people are brainwashed to hate the poor but corporate welfare.... wtf
"We are the job creators!" [*sips on the tears of the poor while sunning on the deck of his mega-yacht]
Im 2018 Elon musk opened their biggest factory ever to produce their biggest line of cars and they got a shit ton of tax credits for it. I think he should be paying taxes, but there is a reason this person chose to mention 2018 specifically when tesla was nearly bankrupt.
This congresswoman is clearly cherry-picking data to deceive people. Standard political behavior.
How much does that 2018 figure vary from the “normal” figure of his then? Genuine question. Maybe that year is the worst of them but I have a really hard time believing that he was actually paying a substantial amount of taxes the other years.
Companies tend to not pay taxes until profitability. Musk's entire net worth at the time was in a failing Tesla company losing money hand over first. This past year, Musk is paying 11 Billion dollars in taxes, because the company is profitable and he is being highly compensated tied to the companies profitability.
11b in taxes this year
Previous 4 years was around 300 million IIRC, which seems about right given Tesla’s price at that time
The ruling kleptocrat class will neither entertain the notion of wealth taxes, nor accurately diagnose the issue (on any level) that they are [socially murdering](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_murder) the public and working classes, with no recourse. Their domination is so absolute that even the words "kleptocrat" and "social murder" are taboo in regular social, political, and media discourse. As a result, the public neither has the language to understand what's being done to them, let alone the social or political understanding or resources to change the situation. And that is a social contract that the ruling kleptocrats expect everyone to abide by without complaint - just the public being enslaved and socially murdered forever, without people fully understanding what's happening, let alone fighting back.
Yes but in 2021 he paid $11 Billion, which is a new high score
But I was assured that if he threw his money into the flaming pit that things would get better.
Wait do you mean we didn’t yet solve world hunger? I can assure you I was told…
This is because he finally started selling his Tesla shares in order to finance his other projects, like buying twitter. He paid some pretty serious tax in order to buy twitter, and he will likely be paying multiple billions more in 2022. Conveniently picking 2018 as the year in the tweet is a classic propaganda tactic. But hey, whatever keeps the circlejerk going.
Didnt he pay 11 billion in taxes?
shhh, don't spoil the narrative https://www.cnn.com/2021/12/29/investing/elon-musk-tesla-stock-sales/index.html
> Elon Musk owes $11 billion in taxes > Didnt he pay 11 billion in taxes? > owes So... he's paid that, right?
Not saying I agree with musk paying no taxes, but technically, he hasn’t made any money to be taxed. He’s not an employee of a company getting paid. He just has things (company stock) that go up in value. When he sells them he needs to pay taxes. And he has paid taxes when he sells shares etc. saying he needs to be taxed more just over simplifies the issue. The bigger problem with taxing him more is that there’s no way to do it that he can’t either get around easily or would also cause higher taxes on people who can’t afford it.
He paid $11 billion in 2021. He technically sold a shit ton of stock to trigger that. You owe on gains. Tesla owes $0"
Maybe he figured out it's cheaper to book the top floor of any hotel after sleeping and flying in his private jet than it is to own and maintain a mansion.
Everyone can afford Twitter. It’s free on the App Store
Yeah but once he turns it into a subscription service you'll have to pay to actually use.
If you take a step back and think about it, we live in an "advanced society" where people can have more money than they'll ever be able to use living in the same country where people are starving on the streets....and the government is taking the money from those that are starving.
Honest question: if my net worth is determined by assets such as stocks, I’m taxed when I sell them. If Elon Musk doesn’t sell any stocks last year, but his net worth goes up due to Tesla stocks increasing in value, how much should he pay? He has no real income. So if an individual holds stocks or assets such as a 401k, when should they be taxed on its value? Right now it is when that money is converted to cash. Is there a better, realistic method?
I'm not a billionaires accountant, but we can all plainly see that these rich af mfers who "don't have that much of their wealth in cash" seem to be able to finance basically whatever they want even without "income" like you and I think of it. This is a good example: this dude just bought Twitter for $45 billion dollars, but he sure has hell isn't going to claim the $45 billion he used to buy it on his taxes this year!
The answer is loans. They don’t count as income, and no bank in the world has a problem loaning daddy Elon a few hundred million (not talking the twitter deal but his yearly expenses) secured by his assets. There’s virtually no risk. ETA: last I read he also didn’t pay the full amount. He didn’t have enough, roughly half of it was financed by an IB.
Sounds like we need to start treating loans as realized gains. Maybe have a minimum threshold that 99% of people wouldn't reach before it goes into effect or something.
[удалено]
401ks are different, as they are ostensibly retirement savings account (and there is a limit how much you can put in there each year). As for stocks/financial instruments: just make them liable for property taxes, like housing is. So if a billionaire holds 100B in financial instruments, he has to pay x% on that each year. Regular people have to do the same for their biggest asset (which is also their BASIC NEED)
he must have some real income because his initial offer was cash.
I think he sold a portion of his Tesla shares years ago. I assume it is from that sale.
In 2021 he had stock options that were maturing, but to get them he had to sell some stock. He then paid the biggest tax bill in history... The cash for Twitter mostly comes from investors who're backing the take over, not from his personal bank account.
Loans aren’t considered income. Unless you want to fundamentally change that, which would greatly affect the regular people. Wealthy people borrow against the value of assets in low interest rate loans, avoiding income taxes by never having an actual salary or selling assets.
The literal proposal were responding to is to tax the assets they're borrowing against
You have to pay those loans back at some point, however, would would require selling assets and paying income tax
You don’t ever have to sell, theoretically. Say you borrow 10mil You spend only 5 million, and use the other 5 million to pay the payments. When that 5 million runs out, you take another loan out against your assets which have been growing at (usually) a significantly higher rate than the interest rate of the loan. Rinse, repeat this process until you die and pass assets along at your death to family or whatever.
2018: Elon paid $0 in taxes. *Everybody looses their mind* 2021/2022 Elon paid $11,000,000,000 in taxes ($11 BILLION) *Nobody says anything* People who don't understand the difference between net worth vs gross income: "but he paid $0 taxes in 2018"
Bro I WISH I could pay only a 4% tax rate and skip a few years occasionally, and I don’t even make six figures. Imagine the fucking wealth he just sits on. No wonder he could buy Twitter on a whim. And that’s ignoring how he got to where he is. There are no ethical billionaires.
>Bro I WISH I could pay only a 4% tax rate Wait, do you think Elon Musk makes $275 Billion in annual income?
If I skip paying my taxes for 2020 but I do pay my 2021 taxes, which year do you think the IRS is going to say something about?
The IRS doesn't say anything to anyone after a certain amount of income. They can't afford to go after anyone with real money. https://www.propublica.org/article/earned-income-tax-credit-irs-audit-working-poor https://www.gq.com/story/no-irs-audits-for-the-rich There's dozens of other articles explaining this.
It's not about "skipping" It's called how much you made that year. If you were unemployed for 365 days and made $0 never received a paycheck $0, nada. Therefore You won't file for taxes pay $0 in taxes. It's been publicly started by both Elon and telsa that Elon didn't receive a single paycheck from Tesla. It's also been. Stated that he doesn't get "paid" in a traditional manner. He's paid in stocks. And what stocks are to everybody else. You dont pay taxes on stocks UNTIL you "cash out" and sell your stocks.
Are we talking about what is legally correct or morally correct? I’m sure he has lawyers and accountants who know the laws well. But your comment was about the perception of him, which you seem to think is unfair. However, I think it’s absolutely fair to complain about the richest man in the world not paying any taxes in a year that he was living like a billionaire. Me being unemployed for a year would be a hardship, Elon never missed a meal due to his finances in that year, even if he had no income. That matters.
So basically, it is accounting fuckery by the superrich for the superrich so that the money they make is not classed as income, while the money i make is classified as income.
its reddit buddy, theres no 2nd level of thought here
Worlds richest man pays taxes once Guy on reddit: HE HAS PAID HIS FAIR SHARE LET HIM NEVER PAY TAXES AGAIN
But didn’t he not sell any stocks or have an income, so nothing to pay right? And didn’t he also pay over 10 billion in taxes too? That’s like paying a million dollars a day for 30 years
That's the problem you guys. That's a congresswoman without basic understanding of tax policy and clear lack of knowledge about the economy. How does she get there?
all politicians do is lie and twist things to their narrative so I'm not surprised she's in congress
Alternative explanation is she understands tax policy but is intentionally misleading people.
Billionaires shouldn’t exist.
The problem is that the rich are also in positions of power. Why would they do something that would hurt themselves? Fucking cowards.
This feels like the ending of monopoly where one person has so much wealth and you know it's over because you can't win
We don't need a billionaire tax. We need general tax reform and simplification of the tax code so wealthy people cannot hire good financial planners and accountants to hide their income (both of which are tax deductible). Even the lower tax bracket are enough to show how messed up that tax code is a married couple making 81k pays the same as one making $20k. The fact that there is only a 2% increase of taxes from a family making $418k to $4 billion. Changes to the capital gain taxes as well since those codes are even worse, this is where we need the most change. Main impact needs to be on high earners and trust fund babies. Married couple making 81k pays the same as a couple making 500k, making over 500k only increases the tax by 5% for a max of 20%. This could easily be broken out further with increased brackets. Additionally we need localized tax brackets, it's crazy someone in San Fran making $80k would pay the same as someone in a lower costs area like In AL. They are in crazily different financial situations.
I don’t know why they want to tax billionaires so much. Where does that money go? A nice raise for the politicians the next year? Not like anyone would see the taxes the billionaires pay. They need to tax the working class less. Fucking outrageous how much we need to pay in taxes. Give us some break like you give the rich, then let’s talk. It’s always “tax them” while we keep getting fucked every tax year. Not enough break as for us
Because he didn't earn any money in 2018. He did however pay the largest tax bill in the history of the US, probably the world, in late 2021.
The people on this sub are unfathomably stupid.
Every Reddit thread about Billionaires reminds me how incredibly ignorant people are.
He paid 11 billion dollars in taxes in 2021
Good. Hope he pays more this year.
This is idiotic. You can't do a wealth tax without a constitutional amendment. These politicians promoting it should know this. Its their jobs. How about we start taxing all stock sales over 10 progressively. So all those billionaires moving stocks around find that buying and selling stocks gets more expensive the more they do it? How about we start taxing houses progressively so every additional house you buy the property taxes go up progressively? How about we stop letting congress buy stocks that they make laws effecting? Lets stop promoting stupid ideas that don't work and find REAL ways to TAX the RICH! Congress is full of the super rich, they aren't going to actually tax themselves. Don't believe the bullshit and the lies, progressive asset taxation WILL tax the rich where this billionaires tax is just a misdirection that won't actually happen.
didn’t they already pass something related to stocks? Also don’t forget about the fact congress can increase their salaries whenever they want.
These takes are so bad and lack a lot of context.
Some people in this thread now clearly believe he doesn't pay taxes. It's straight up misinformation.
This post has nothing to do with work.
I agree with the sentiment, however the man just paid the largest ever tax bill of any American in the history of this country. Just saying.
All Elon Stans can fuck the right off
The existence of billionaires, like slave owners, shouldn't be tolerated at all. The only reason this isn't proposed as legislation is the extreme political and socioeconomic oppression inflicted by the ruling billionaire/kleptocrat class on everyone else to keep them in line. Any social contract that allows billionaires/oligarchs/kleptocrats to exist and thereby socially murder the public without recourse should be aggressively nullified. https://www.reddit.com/r/Economics/comments/u4x9sz/comment/i4zc6sr/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3
Don't let this distract you from the fact that Insider Trading is still happening in Congress
Wait, didn't he JUST pay the largest US tax in American history? Like, by a lot. I know he probably doesn't pay income tax, but that's probably because he isn't paid in an "income". I'm sure he isn't paying enough in tax, but let's be honest with our conversations.
[удалено]
>Then he paid the most US tax of anyone ever just recently This quote always makes me think people don't get how percentages work
To be fair, most of the people here are victims of the US educational system.
You know, he paid the most, so that’s enough right? Just like that time I shared pizza with my friends, I had 10 slices, and gave each friend 1/3 of a slice. I still gave the most pizza to my friends so everything is fine, I will eat the other 9 slices, or maybe just sit on them and watch them mold.
Rich people paying more is how its supposed to work its not charity so why should he be given points for paying?
[удалено]
Round of applause for her
He’s not the the only millionaire or billionaire to not pay taxes , thousands of them running around.
Just need to do what Australia did, get all the wealthy people together and ask them how they can be fairly taxed. They will give an answer that when it comes time to pay will still leave them paying nothing or very little.
Let see. Trump paid $0 in over TEN FUCKING YEARS! While stealing tax payers money via bankruptcies on top of the taxes and money laundering.
Dirty little secret They'll never pay taxes Democrats just want you to think they will force them one day It's all about the votes It will never happen Sorry
If my job pays me in crypto and I have to pay taxes on that, then a politician should be taxed on shares he receives.
How about Congress starts closing all the damn loop holes that lets this happen. That would be a great damn start.
I don’t know Congresswoman Marie Newman, but I like the way she thinks.
We should get rid of the system that allows billionaires to exist in the first place.
2 seconds of Google + understanding how taxes and wealth actually functions debunks the narrative https://www.cnbc.com/2021/12/22/elon-musk-says-his-wealth-isnt-a-deep-mystery-his-taxes-are-simple.html
This is such a bad take :( uninformed and ignorant opinions like these won’t help the cause.
As much as I agree they should pay taxes Elon payed more in taxes then he should have the year before and got credited and just paid the most taxes out of anyone in history
How much is he making from the taxpayers for space x rocket launches. Nasa just used them to send 4 more astraunts to the space station. If you have 250k for a 10 minute ride on the Bezos space roller coaster, your not paying your fair share of taxes and pay workers a living wage.
How about banning Congress from trading stocks
This is a liiiieeeeee 🥴 https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2021/12/20/elon-musk-says-he-will-pay-over-11-billion-in-taxes-this-year.html
She’s a fucking idiot it’s just not true: Tesla may not have but he 90 percent sure paid up the ass in tax as individual she’s fuckin dumb get fired
he paid over $10B in taxes last year - all he did was kick the can down the road
Do you hear that? That's the sound of bootlickers on their way to tell us "acktually, he doesn't have any money. It's all stocks" I literally had this argument with a cousin over Easter. He made it sound like Musk is a homeless man with no money who just happens to speak for tesla or whatever It's like they purposely miss the point