Elon Musk Reveals What He Owes In Taxes And It’s Shocking
Elon Musk has let on the amount of money he is paying in taxes this year and number is absolutely staggering. It's a massive check to write
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Elon Musk has made many a wave over the last few years what with running a major car company and setting his sights on space. The dude is one of the richest people in the world and even recently took to Twitter to have followers “help” him make a decision about the future of his finances. He’s thought big around some of the true frontiers in our world and beyond, and he also is about to do another huge thing. It’s coming in the form of a monster tax bill. Elon Musk is saying that he will pay more than $11 billion dollars in federal and state taxes this year. Yikes.
Elon Musk took to Twitter to hand out the news about his tax payments for this year. Apparently, he’s already paid $7 billion and has another $4 billion on the way. It’s an almost inconceivable number and represents one of the largest personal payments in the history of tax collection. Musk was quick to let folks know about his payments, likely signaling to folks who’ve claimed in the past that he and other billionaires were skirting around the tax code. Hard to make that claim now that he’s ponied up some serious tax coin. Check it out.
The tax payment comes after Elon Musk decided to sell off Tesla shares earlier this year. He had put out a Twitter poll apparently letting followers decide how he should go about selling off 10% of his Tesla shares. At the time, that represented roughly $25 billion dollars worth of options. The poll ended up with 58% of folks saying he should sell them off. It’s likely this was always the plan, or he knew the crowd would vote in favor of him selling because, hell, why not? But he did indeed follow through with the move. That’s where the tax bill comes from.
The Verge notes that this tax bill for Elon Musk was probably going to come due whether he made this move or not. Apparently, the options were set to expire next year anyway which meant he was going to have to cash out one way or another. By choosing this timing he was likely working under the assumption that the bill was even less now than in a year or two when different legislation could have upped the number considerably. I mean what’s a couple of billion here or there, but this was all part of the plan to reduce the tax burden as much as possible. Every dollar counts in this respect.
And this $11 billion tax bill does come on the heels of Elon Musk making an interesting claim a few weeks ago regarding his company SpaceX. He had said the company could face the possibility of bankruptcy because of production on their Raptor engine for the Starship vehicle. He called it a “production crisis” that was much worse than previously assumed. The engines were needed to get Starlink satellites in orbit, thereby helping to fund other projects. But the engine issues were cascading, putting the company in jeopardy.
In all, it looks like Elon Musk will have completed a tax obligation that is almost without comparison when it comes to government receipts. How do you think they’ll spend all that moola?
