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The meme-obsessed founder of Tesla and SpaceX, Elon Musk, who usually gets laughs for his tweets, recently invited the wrath of netizens after he got into a spat with Bernie Sanders on Sunday. After the senior US Senator demanded the wealthy pay their “fair share” of taxes, the world’s richest man had an “obnoxious” reply that has sparked furious debate online about governmental assistance in the growing wealth of billionaires.
“We must demand that the extremely wealthy pay their fair share. Period,” Sanders, who is Senate Budget Committee chairman, wrote on Twitter. In an attempt to troll the 80-year-old senator, Musk responded by saying “I keep forgetting that you’re still alive.”
Sanders has been proposing taxing the “the extremely wealthy”, and Musk, having a net worth of $285 billion, certainly qualifies, according to Bloomberg’s Billionaires Index.
The billionaire CEO, who had already sold about $5 billion in shares, in the electric car company following a Twitter poll, further wrote, “Want me to sell more stock, Bernie? Just say the word.”
Although Musk offered to sell stocks again, netizens were unimpressed. Many slammed him calling his tweet “vile” and asked him to simply pay his taxes. While some lashed out to him for being insensitive to any elderly man, others mocked him with memes and sarcastic tweets.
https://twitter.com/JaxAustin/status/1459966475221962755
https://twitter.com/HiMyNameIsSeton/status/1460063045422620673
https://twitter.com/JaxAustin/status/1459966475221962755
US Senate Democrats have unveiled a proposal to tax billionaires’ stocks and other tradeable assets to help finance President Joe Biden’s social spending agenda and close a loophole that has allowed them to defer capital gains taxes indefinitely, Reuters reported.
According to CNN, Sanders has proposed an annual tax on the top 0.1 percent of US households, which he claims will raise about $4.35 trillion over the next decade and cut the wealth of billionaires in half over 15 years.
“Musk didn’t mention in his prior tweets that he had millions of stock options that must be exercised before they expire in August 2022. He said in September that he was likely to exercise “a huge block” of those options toward the end of 2021,” Fortune noted. The publication highlighted how in October, Musk said Tesla would move its headquarters from California to Austin, Texas, a state which levies no income tax.
