I’m not sure this applies considering he spends a considerable amount of effort on manipulating Tesla’s share price
Elon Musk's epic bacon adventures
- Thread starter Eboue
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I’m not sure this applies considering he spends a considerable amount of effort on manipulating Tesla’s share price
You're wrong, he just wants to be like you and me, he just can't help being mega rich because the shares keep increasing in value.
What was the original quote?
As usual, totally missing the point for comedic effect
Apparently, he is paying 11 billion in taxes this year (cause of stocks sold and the options exercised), which is the highest tax bill any person has ever paid.
How much would have had to pay in taxes this year if the options weren't exercised ?
How much did he make?
It depends if he would have sold stock or not, right?
Those 15B in cash that he sold from the stocks. Everything else is unrealized gains which will get taxed when it will get realized. As it should be.
Richest man in the world pays the highest tax bill ever. Is that something to really praise him over?
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People who can't find the way avoiding paying their taxes are praise worthy apparently.
It's literally sponsored all over the internet that he is going to pay 11 billion in taxes portraying him like some great guy because of that.
The point being, he would continue to accrue unprecedented amounts of wealth without paying any tax unless he exercised his options or sold stock and would pay far less in percentage than an average person.
Or he would lose 90% of that wealth when TSLA stock loses 90% of its value, sooner or later (it is trading above 300 PE, stock is generally considered overvalued if it is trading above 20-30PE, so this is 10-15 times more than what overvalued typically means). That is the entire point, we cannot tax into hypotheticals of what is gonna happen.
It is not more or less worthy of praise than anyone paying their taxes.
TSLA could just as easily go to 2k and stay there for years and Musk not pay any taxes beyond the tiny amount he uses for his daily expenses. He would still be the richest person in the history of the world and not pay taxes on his wealth to the nation that provided him with the system and infrastructure to amass it. Is this in your view fair ?
And I might win the lottery of 500M, should I pay taxes for 500M? (ok, it is exaggerated, but my point is that it is a hypothetical sum of money, it is not really 'real').
Yes, I think it is perfectly fair to not pay taxes on unrealized gains. That has been my point in the last two pages. Realized, pay it up. Unrealised, it is hypothetical, and I think it will cause a lot of damage (cofounder losing control over the company, stocks go from cofounder/CEO to short-term speculators, the value of the company likely goes down meaning so does your pension fund, etc etc). Obviously talking if this is done systematically, not particularly for Elon.
As long as he does not touch those stocks, they are not money, but are control over the company. Much better Elon Musk to have control over Tesla, than the state of short-term investors/speculators.
I know Revan is going to get pounded on so let me ask to those who disagree with him: how do you propose to tax Elon's Tesla equity?
The lottery analogy obviously doesn't work since Musk has already accrued the wealth. All you could ever do is hope you win the lottery against astronomical odds, whereas Musk could literally decide tomorrow, to cash in every share of his TSLA stock and walk away with the money for something else (as he's repeatedly said about applying his wealth to take humans to Mars).
Your worship of him is fecking bizarre, Revan.
Sanders was on the right track when he ran.
https://berniesanders.com/issues/tax-extreme-wealth/
How the Tax on Extreme Wealth Would Work
This tax on extreme wealth would have a progressive rate structure that would only apply to the wealthiest 180,000 households in America who are in the top 0.1 percent.
It would start with a 1 percent tax on net worth above $32 million for a married couple. That means a married couple with $32.5 million would pay a wealth tax of just $5,000.
The tax rate would increase to 2 percent on net worth from $50 to $250 million, 3 percent from $250 to $500 million, 4 percent from $500 million to $1 billion, 5 percent from $1 to $2.5 billion, 6 percent from $2.5 to $5 billion, 7 percent from $5 to $10 billion, and 8 percent on wealth over $10 billion. These brackets are halved for singles.
Under this plan, the wealth of billionaires would be cut in half over 15 years which would substantially break up the concentration of wealth and power of this small privileged class.
If Elon Musk decices to cash every TSLA share tomorrow, do you really think that TSLA stock will have the same value? It would not only crash that stock, but it would definitely ensure NASDAQ stopping trading for the day. And in any case, if he does so, then he gets taxed in the profits. As he should.
So again, until then, those shares are not wealth, but control over a company. And I think that he has proven to be quite good at leading that company, so no problem there.
That's not really 'how', that is 'how much'.
Like in all things that Bernie ever proposed, there is no 'how'.
Interesting. Seems somewhat similar to the Dutch in the sense that it's an annual tax on your worth although the Dutch use different rates.
Practically, this means Elon would have to sell Tesla-shares in order to pay this tax?
He wouldn't need to cash out completely. He could sell half and still walk off with over $100 billion. That is money that is being hoarded away from society by one man because the system he accrued the money in is broken.
Yes. The ultra wealthy would likely need to liquidate stock to pay their taxes.
I wonder how this affects markets. Could we see trends developing surrounding the annual liquidation period?
It would definitely affect the stock market as there would a forced sale of stock over a year. It's possible that rules could be brought in that the seller can immediately buy the stock back at value (so effectively just paying the tax, but keeping the stock) as that wouldn't disturb the stock valuation if done that way.
It would shake them initially and they would eventually adjust and recover quickly once participants start buying up the volume of shares available for various stocks like TSLA, FB, etc. once they are available at a reduced prices. The quality of the products and services these companies create would remain the same, the only difference would be that their largest shareholder would have to pay taxes.
Wouldn't be behind taxing unrealised gains at all.
In any case, under that law, that would mean him selling almost his entire TSLA stock. 8% of 300B is around 25B. Which means that he would need to sell 100B in stocks. But because people know that, the stock would tank just before, in anticipation of the move.
That law of Bernie essentially would mean removing founders from their companies.
NB: Unless it meant to tax the wealth instead of realized gains. In which case he would need to sell 25B in stocks, and give the money to the government (untaxed). How would he be able to get that stock back, I mean, no one in the world is keeping 25B in cash, right?
It wouldn't happen to ordinary people below a certain threshold. Only ultra wealthy people, of which there are very, very few.
The system is not broken though. It is easily the best system the human race was able to come with so far.
It obviously needs to be improved. And significantly so.
It has its advantages and its disadvantages. One of its disadvantages is that it allows insanely disproportionate amounts of wealth to coagulate among the very, very few, which means that capital isn't available to the rest of society. This is easily fixed to create an even better system for everyone.
It is not. If it was so easy, it would have been done a very long time ago.
It obviously needs to be fixed, because it is not working in a satisfactory manner for many, and it is not working at all for some. But that doesn't mean that the solution is easy. Far from that.
That's what I was thinking, although I assumed that if a law was made it would be on the wealth but it would still be a huge amount of tax and unaffordable. It would have other implications as well, as the current majority stock holders would be forced to lose their majorities. For some companies that would tank the stock if they hold voters rights.
The solution in the US is easy. The power structure of the corrupt influence of money in the US political system is what is stopping it from being implemented.
It will not only tank the stock, but it could easily destroy (or at least heavily damage) the big companies. The effect of CEO is massively underestimated in this left-wing forum. There are countless examples, of how a bad CEO/board can feck things up*. This would essentially ensure that happening in a yearly basis.
* Apple ousts Jobs, they go almost bankrupt, he comes back, they become the biggest company in the world.
* Gates leaves, Ballmer does a good job of fecking things up with MS, he gets replaced by Nadella and they are back to their previous glory.
* Intel who had a shitty management, are in an existential crisis despite that they had a monopoly.
I have some real troubling believing that this will work in practice. On Bernie's website there's a reference to an article by Yale professors so I'll go read that.
The whole concept of selling shares to fulfil tax duties is one I find hard to grasp. What if Musk by coincidence lives to 110 years old, will he even have a meaningful amount of shares left?
To add to that, Intel are beginning to make the right moves again after becoming money focused rather than the engineering company which made them a monopoly. That's happening since Gelsinger became CEO who incidentally is an engineer. They'll be back in 2 years from the moves he's making.
Shouldn't we be looking at systems where you can only earn money on work and not through just having a lot of money already anyway?
You start by fixing all the low-hanging fruit that empower the rich:
- Remove the barrier on unearned income and allow it to be taxed the same as earned income
- Increase the capital gains tax so every time a Musk or Koch brother cashes in they pay a lot more
- Re-install a substantial inheritance tax (50% +) for any large inheritance (over 5-10M say)
- Work to close international tax havens
- Rework the property tax for 2nd/3rd properties or above and on luxury properties
- Create annual minimum taxes for certain levels of accumulated wealth
The current system in the US is broken and it would be easy to begin redressing if the Republicans who jerk-off over Citizens United didn't have such complete obsession with political power and cotnrol.