The Tesla boss is known for moving the markets with his tweets.
(Photo: AP)
new York The exceptional entrepreneur Elon Musk is once again resorting to an exceptional solution. The Tesla CEO had his followers on Twitter vote whether he should sell ten percent of his shares. This would make the electric car pioneer and space entrepreneur, who receives no salary and no bonuses for his job as Tesla boss, taxable.
“Lately there has been a lot of talk about unrealized profits as a means of tax avoidance,” wrote the richest person in the world on Saturday evening. “So I propose to sell ten percent of my Tesla shares.” His followers had 24 hours to vote on it. After the deadline, more than three million people voted – a good 57 percent of them for the sale of the shares.
On the stock exchange, the prospect of a placement of Tesla shares by Musk weighed on the electric car maker. In Frankfurt, the papers listed in Germany slipped by around seven percent in the morning.
Musk’s net worth is currently valued at more than $ 330 billion. 210 billion of that go back to its more than 170 million Tesla shares. If he sells ten percent of that, he could – depending on the share price – make around $ 21 billion and would have to pay taxes on the profits.
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Musk’s move comes at a time when Joe Biden’s government is working on a billionaire tax: According to this, the particularly rich should pay taxes not only on their realized share gains, but also if they keep the shares but the prices rise. Biden wants to use the taxes to finance his billion dollar climate, social and infrastructure packages. Musk has criticized the tax plans.
The background to the considerations in the Biden government is that the multibillionaires in the USA often only pay low taxes. According to data from the Propublica portal, to which unpublished data from the US IRS has been leaked, the best-known US billionaires have paid very little or no taxes in recent years, despite their enormous wealth growth.
That goes for Amazon founder Jeff Bezos as well as for media billionaire Michael Bloomberg and the investors Warren Buffett, Carl Icahn and George Soros. According to the report, Musk also paid no income tax at all in around 2018.
“I will stick to the results of this survey, no matter how it turns out,” wrote Musk now on Twitter, where he has 62.7 million followers. However, analysts also point out that Musk may have to sell a large number of stocks anyway to pay taxes on options that expire in 2022. According to CNBC, he faces a back tax payment of more than $ 15 billion.
So the vote could also be a nifty PR stunt. Just two weeks ago, Musk had offered the director of the United Nations World Food Program a share sale on Twitter: If he could explain to him how to stop hunger in the world with six billion dollars, he would “immediately” buy shares in this amount Selling.
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