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- Sen. Elizabeth Warren slammed Elon Musk’s new title as TIME’s person of the year.
- She said he should stop “freeloading” and pay his fair share in taxes as the world’s richest person.
- Musk is worth $297 billion, but managed to pay $0 in federal income tax in 2018.
Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren isn’t pleased with Elon Musk’s designation as TIME’s 2021 person of the year.
Musk, who is worth $297 billion, has vocally opposed government involvement in his wealth — something Warren and other progressive lawmakers have slammed given his avoidance in paying what they say is his fair share in taxes. While Warren’s proposal to impose a 2% tax on household net worth has not yet come to fruition, she has been a staunch advocate of taxing the wealthy and didn’t hold back on Monday, after TIME announced Musk’s new title.
“Let’s change the rigged tax code so The Person of the Year will actually pay taxes and stop freeloading off everyone else,” Warren wrote on Twitter.
She also shared a new TIME cover created by Americans for Tax Fairness with the words “TAX ME” placed over a photo of Musk, alongside text that said Musk paid $0 in federal income tax in 2018.
—Elizabeth Warren (@ewarren) December 13, 2021
A recent ProPublica investigation found Musk, and others in his tax bracket, did not pay federal taxes as of 2018 because they did not have income, only assets. That’s why Musk has strongly opposed Senate Finance Chair Ron Wyden’s “billionaire’s tax,” which would tax wealthy people’s assets.
As Insider’s Juliana Kaplan previously reported, taxing billionaire’s would raise $557 over a decade, per an analysis from the Joint Committee on Taxation, and Musk would be on the hook for $50 billion in taxes for the first five years.
“This makes crystal clear the extent to which the tax code is simply not equipped to tax billionaires fairly, or ensure they pay any taxes at all,” Wyden said in an October statement. “Working Americans like nurses and firefighters are rightly disgusted by the status quo.”
Musk responded to Wyden’s proposal at the time, saying on Twitter: “Eventually, they run out of other people’s money and then they come for you.”
As Insider reported, Musk does not want the government to lay a hand on his fortune even though government subsidies helped him grow that fortune. The government provided subsidies to Tesla, his electric vehicle company, along with a $2.89 billion contract for his aerospace company, SpaceX, to land “commercial” humans on the moon.
Even so, Musk said he opposed that kind of help from the government in his interview with TIME.
“They’re basically saying they want control of the assets,” Musk said. “This does not result in, actually, the good of the people. You want those who are managing capital to be good stewards of capital. And I think the government is inherently not a good steward of capital.”
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