I know a lot of people love Elon Musk. I realize that the heroic mythology surrounding him really gets some people excited. I get it. I really do. Elon Musk did make something once; it was a pretty shitty website implementing a concept that was good but not novel, and then some really dumb wealthy people gave him a ton of money for it. That website no longer exists. Thereafter, Elon Musk really hasn’t made anything; he’s just jumped from coattails to coattails. He’s even gone so far as to purchase the right to claim that he was a founder of Tesla even though he was not.
Elon Musk doesn’t really have a filter between his internal monologue and his mouth. He basically says whatever pops into his mind at the moment. Most of it is very self-serving. One thing that emerged from his mouth was, “I don’t care about money. I don’t care about possessions.” I think his intent was to make him sound noble, and it sure did work toward fooling some people. Now, though, Elon Musk is whining like a little baby because of this bill that would take a relatively small portion of his money, instead of letting him go without paying taxes. He literally said, “Eventually, they run out of other people’s money and they come for you.” Weird that an enlightened man who doesn’t need money is acting like a psychotic dragon guarding his hoard of gold.
Let’s do a little exercise. Subtract your debts from the combined value of all the cash and titled property you own. That’s your net worth. The average family’s net worth in the US is supposedly around $725,000 (seems really high to me). But wait! Let’s figure out what your practical net worth is. Subtract the value of your home and one car each for every working person who lives there; you need that stuff to survive. (If no one in your house is working because, perhaps, you are retired, you still need one car.) What’s your practical net worth now? Probably nothing, but let’s say it is something like $10,000. If you had to pay $10 billion per year in taxes, that would be quite hard on you!
But you don’t. That’s what is proposed for Elon Musk, not you. His practical net worth is $250 billion; he could lose $249 billion of that and it would not affect his lifestyle at all. You may not really appreciate how much $1 billion is. If he pays $10 billion per year over the next 5 years, that’s the same as if the average family had to pay $400 per year. “I pay way more than that already!” you might say. Yes. Exactly.
What if a person with $10,000 in practical net worth stops and gives 0.001% of their money to a homeless person at the on ramp? That’s $10 — which is a pretty good gift! And it wouldn’t affect our hypothetical person at all. But what if Elon Musk does the same thing? That would be $249 million, and he would still have over $250 billion; it literally wouldn’t even affect how we describe his wealth.
Here’s something else interesting: It turns out that just 2% of Elon Musk’s wealth would save 42 million people from starving to death. Again, that’s money that he doesn’t need and really isn’t using for anything. (Yes, I realize stocks.)
Despite Elon Musk’s lie that “they’re going to come for you!” the fact of the matter is that they are just coming for the assholes — not even all the assholes, just the most egregious assholes. Since it is the assholes that control our government, this is a very interesting situation. Will the majority of the assholes turn on the richest 700 assholes in order to keep capitalism functioning? Or will they band together and screw over working people yet again?
In either case, this should be the opportunity Republicans have supposedly been waiting for to finally strike at the heart of the elite conspiracy controlling our government — because those 700 people are literally those conspirators*. Or was that whole argument just a cheap excuse for something more sinister?
Update: The proposed legislation is already dead.
Related:
Elon Musk and the Default Plan
Elon Musk is Not Your Friend by Some More News (YouTube)
Elon Musk used government money to build Tesla. But he fears a tax on billionaires
*Note: It isn’t really a conspiracy.