Why is Elon Musk Lying About Selling 10% of Tesla? (Script & Sources)

Good morning, bad news! Elon Musk owes $15 billion in taxes, but apparently doesn’t have any money, so he’s being FORCED to sell 10% of his shares in Tesla. He even made a Twitter poll claiming he was wrongly accused of tax avoidance, leaving the decision to his followers as to whether or not he should sell his stocks - since also apparently he doesn’t get paid a salary or receive any bonuses from anywhere! Ooh my god, poor Elon!

Except for one problem… it’s all bullshit. Elon Musk is sitting on 22.9 million stock options that he HAS to exercise within the next year or they become worth nothing. This twitter poll is theater for fanboys who apparently can’t see the difference between altruism and increasing your wealth by another 30 billion dollars.

And this trick that Elon Musk is pulling about not having any money is literally designed as a tax avoidance scheme. Between 2014 and 2018, he paid a marginal tax rate of 3.27% with a net worth today of over 300 billion dollars. By comparison, the median American net worth is about $120,000 with an almost 30% tax rate. That means that you and I are worth 2.5 million times less than Elon Musk, but pay ten times his tax rate.

And the way he pulls this scheme is extremely simple. Through his stock options, he is able to take out loans against his company to pay for his lifestyle and any business projects - and you don’t have to pay taxes on a loan - in fact, he gets a TAX BREAK on the interest.

If you actually pay any attention to Elon Musk’s tax avoidance, he’s one of the worst offenders among billionaires, and proves the fact that the rules change completely if you have enough money. Between 2015 and 2017, already a multi-billionaire he paid less than $70,000 in taxes, and zero dollars in taxes in 2018.

But apparently, that was STILL too high, because last year, he moved his official residence from California where he built his fortune from 27 billion to 300 billion in just the last 18 months, to Texas, which doesn’t have a state income tax.

And that’s kind of a perfect metaphor for how Musk built his fortune. While doing everything possible to avoid paying even a tenth of what he owes the government - nearly all of his wealth can be attributed to deliberate benefits from the government he is refusing to pay back.

His companies were jumpstarted with $5 billion in government subsidies, without which they would have never gotten off the ground. And California, which Musk has abandoned, raises the total rebate on buying a Tesla to $10,000. Musk was even able to make up a huge revenue shortfall, by selling environmental credits in California to other automakers.

Elon Musk is not a charitable or good person. We did a video about him and other billionaires being able to help save 42 million people from starvation, and his response was demanding that the World Food Program release it’s budget numbers, with legions of his followers screaming that most of the money raised by the WFP goes to paying its fat cat executives. Except the WFP already releases it’s detailed budget breakdown every single year, they are legally required to, as the largest humanitarian organization in the world. Turns out, they spend exactly 4.6% on administration, and 82.7% on actually feeding people. There are almost no charities in the world with a better breakdown, much less the largest one in the world. But to Elon Musk and his relentless, inconvincible fanboys, it absolutely doesn’t matter.

Neither he nor they have any interest in helping save millions of lives, or improving anyone’s standard of living besides Elon Musk’s. And it should be deeply embarrassing to them - but of course, it’s not. Fanboying the richest man in the world because he spends his free time terminally online sharing bad memes to defend his wealth pretty much says everything you need to know about them.