Did Elon Musk Own Bernie on Twitter... Or Is He Just Dumb? (Script & Sources)

Good morning, bad news: Senator Bernie Sanders and Billionaire Elon Musk are fighting over whether or not the extremely wealthy actually pay their fair share of taxes. In just the last week, Musk sold nearly $7 billion dollars worth of stocks to pay his taxes, after which Bernie Sanders tweeted “We must demand that the extremely wealthy pay their fair share. Period.”

Unprompted, Elon Musk responded by saying that he “keeps forgetting” that Bernie’s alive, and taunted Bernie by asking if he should sell more of his stocks. That $7 billion was about 2% of his Tesla holdings. That sure sounds like a lot, so who’s right?

Bernie or Elon?

Well, let’s start with the fact that when you or I or even Bernie pay their taxes, we pay 10-15 times the percentage that Musk just paid. In fact, for the last 4 years, the ultra-wealthy in America have paid a lower overall tax rate than the middle class thanks to the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, which dramatically lowered taxes for anyone making more than a million dollars a year - and ultimately raises taxes on anyone making less than $75,000.

Simply stated, the bottom 65% of Americans are paying more so that the top 0.3% of Americans can pay less. There’s no tricky statistical reason for this, it’s just the continued effects of trickle-down theory, which has been disproven for decades. But incredibly, even President Trump, who passed that tax hike on the middle class, couldn’t have predicted what would happen to the ultra-wealthy in the last two years. Nobody could, it was outrageous!

Between 2019 and 2021, the ultra-wealthy completely destroyed the real economy in order to create a new economy that was hyper focused on their personal wealth. Nearly the entire stock market is now owned by a very small percentage of people - just 10% of Americans own 89% of it.

In 2019 there was only one person worth over $100 billion dollars. Today, there are ten of them, and the collective net worth of billionaires jumped by $2 trillion dollars during the pandemic - which is almost twice the amount that American workers lost.

But none of this is news, every single one of us, including billionaire bootlickers, understand that the pandemic was extremely good for the ultra-wealthy, and permanently destroyed the lives of millions of Americans - both financially and by killing them.

And on that level, Senator Bernie Sanders has a pretty good point - in light of the unfathomable transfer of wealth from the middle and working class to the billionaire class, it doesn’t seem unreasonable for them to pay at least as much as we do in taxes, because right now they either pay less, or nothing at all. And even if for some weird parasocial reason you think that billionaires are your friends because they post bad memes online, just like you, and therefore shouldn’t be criticized for their actions - it’s not really an attack to say that they should have to play by the same rules as everyone else - which is what Bernie is saying.

But Elon Musk has a good point too - in his second tweet, he’s says “Want me to sell more stock, Bernie? Just say the word…”.

And we agree with him there, we do want Bernie Sanders, and the rest of the legislative branch to say the word, and make him sell more of his stocks to pay more in taxes.

Not 2%, but 94%, which was the marginal tax rate towards in the aftermath of World War Two, when the ultra-wealthy were watching their fortunes skyrocket on the back of a national tragedy.

Sound familiar?

In fact, this tax rate of 94% on any income above what today would be $3 million dollars

ushered in the greatest period of middle class prosperity, higher wages, strong unions, affordable healthcare, and the biggest infrastructure improvements in US history.

Personally, that’s what we think is fair: that the ultra-wealthy are cut off from rampant political and financial favoritism that directly hurts the rest of the country, And which would dramatically improve every aspect of life for nearly every single person in America, including the billionaires. So, in a way, they’re both right.

Bernie’s right that billionaires should pay their fair share, and Elon Musk is right that he keeps forgetting that Bernie is alive, because the only person that billionaires ever think about is themselves.

And we should do something about that.