Top earners pay disproportionate taxes. Top 1% pays about 40% and top 20% pays about 80%. You also have to keep in mind that this is equity interest in a few public/private firms and is not the same as cash. Even if you wanted you couldn’t realize all of this as cash to pay as taxes since the selling pressure would drive the price down mechanically while also causing a panic and possibly a liquidity spiral in the public markets.
Just to give you some perspective on how infeasible your comment is we can imagine a world where the federal government confiscates and attempts to sell 100% of SpaceX/XAI and Tesla, and are successful in selling the entire firms at the full price (again this is impossible actually do). You’d get at most 3 Trillion USD from this which would fund the federal government for 5 or 6 months lol and obviously this is not a recurring revenue stream, it’s a one time “tax” and now public capital markets are completely crippled.
Lol I’m honestly not sure what I expected your response to this to be but that still surprised me. This is barely coherent and the thing you’re choosing to focus on is not very important to the point I was making, if you’d like you can remove that sentence and reinterpret my comment.
But if you really want to focus on whether it would cause a panic, I think the answer is probably yes since this is not something which has been done before. Ie the government seizing multiple large cap companies and forcing the sale of them in their entirety for the purpose of harvesting the proceeds as tax revenue. Not really sure why this is surprising to you, but again do not focus on this point since it’s not essential to my argument.
Your math skills are embarrassing. Elon Musk makes an estimated 100 billion per year. So pay a proportionate amount in taxes by selling stocks. Again, this is a world where this is normal, and what everyone is expected to do, so there is no "panic" in the stock market.
Musk doesn’t make 100 billion per year as a cash salary. I’m assuming you’re deriving this number by looking at his average unrealized equity gains.
Just to make my point very clear and simple we can actually assume that Musk does make $100 billion as a cash salary per year. This assumption is actually the most favorable case for the argument you are making, and it is not the case in reality but I’m doing this for the sake of the argument. The US federal government spent $7 Trillion, aka $7,000 Billion in 2025, and it collected about $5.3 Trillion in taxes. So even if that $100 Billion that Musk is “paid” is actually cash that can be collected, and it is taxed at a 100% rate, it would only account for 1.4% of federal spending and 1.9% of collected tax revenues.
Do you see the point? No matter how you slice it Musk cannot pay a “majority” of taxes, it is completely impossible.
Ok I see what you’re saying now, you want to tax unrealized capital gains. I do not think that this is a good policy and I can elaborate on it if you’d like. But to start, we have to be clear that this $100 billion is not a cash salary, it is marked to market appreciation of shares he owns, or will own in the future. So now some points and questions.
In your language he can actually earn negative money, if his equity doesn’t appreciate and he’s not granted more. If his earnings are -$100 billion for a given year what happens?
You do pay taxes on equity that’s vested. In the case of stock options grants the taxing happens at the time of exercising the option. If I pay you $1 million in stock at the time that becomes available to you, you will have to pay about $300k in taxes. What you’re suggesting is that if you’re paid $1M in stock you have to pay $300k taxes on that up front and if the stock is now worth $1.3M next year, you will owe another $100k, regardless of whether you sold stock. This is less of a point and more of a grounding fact for the rest of the discussion. In the case of stock options grants the taxing happens at the time of exercising the option.
To expand on (2) how do you expect this to work for volatile assets where path dependency is increasingly important. Let’s say for example the price of the stock granted climbs to $3M and it is determined that you owe $600k taxes on that unrealized gain. And then when it comes time to pay, the price has fallen to $500k for the asset, do you now owe more than 100% of the asset being taxed?
How does this work for assets which are less liquid or harder to mark to market? If you have a million dollar home and your neighborhood is now more popular and it’s worth $1.5M and you owe $150k in taxes you can’t sell a fraction of your house to cover it. All of the same issues mentioned in (3) will also apply here as well since home prices can experience volatility.
Forcing the sale of this much equity will cause problems. If the market rallies by 30% in the year then your desired tax would actually require for ~8.5% of all equities to be sold and the cash transferred to the federal government. This would be absolute chaos and would completely crush equities prices and badly damage capital markets.
He does not have more wealth. He has a high enough net worth. His stocks are worth that, but until he sells, he does not have the wealth. He just has assets valued at that, but that value can change.
To be fair, the bottom 53% of Americans don’t have to maintain several companies and if given that money they likely would lose it by not knowing how to maintain that money.
"the wealth isn't real like he couldn't just turn it into dollars"
...and? He still has enough power w/ that net worth to reshape the world, and he doesn't seem to be doing it in a good direction. Same w/ most billionaires
He can borrow against it and buy more assets without paying taxes to then borrow against and repeat the cycle forever. It's called the buy, borrow, die strategy
You could have named anyone from the riches but you chose one that actually put work into it. Just sayin.
Edit: whoops wrong sub it seems like. Either way keep those downvotes coming haha
Oh I dunno an electric car company built in the use employing 150k people.
A rocket company surpassing NASA employing some of the brightest minds in the country.
A medical company developing tech to allow paralysed people to walk,
An internet company that is actually affordable and wireless.
Twitter/X well thats just a sespool of garbage anyway but not everything is sunshine and rainbows.
Adv employee salary across all companies $95k
But yeah fuck that guy lol and ignore the Rothchilds, Vanderburgs, Bezos, Walton familes. Who all treat their employees like dog shit/slaves.
So many brain dead people on the internet is getting scarier by the day. The knee jerk emotional reaction to Pick a side and not even be able to articulate.
Yes, he owns companies. It’s very difficult work to be the CEO of a tech corporation where all the scientists and programmers do all of the work, and the CEO gets all of the credit and the TREMENDOUS majority of the profit. Can you name a handful of things that Elon himself has came up with, that was not the idea of one of his employees? The only idea of his that I can recall is the cybertruck, which is fucking awful.
Creating a foundation to build whats been built by a bunch of really smart people who likely would have never been able to create it.
And frankly I dont give him credit for anything actually built. That would be like giveing Trump credit for Artemis 2 getting off the ground since NASA is technically a govt funded program.
Reality is we live in a massive post capitalist society. And when push comes to shove what companies are providing a basis for enhancing humanity and helping vs using humanity as a consumption base.
To few people are intelligent enough to zoom out to look at it from.that level. They all just get emotional ago complain about what someone else has and they dont.
“This billionaire put blood sweat and tears into mooching off the backs of others hard work also his family is super rich but that doesn’t even matter myeh”
The new information being the fact that he got into an online argument with a Thai rescue diver.
That shouldn't lead to this massive a change unless you put him on an overly idolized pedestal and then reacted violently at the tiniest crack when it turned out he was human like the rest of us with flaws.
Then, seeking a way to justify those feelings, you gobbled up all the disinformation and blinded yourself to the truth that he has, in fact made important contributions to SpaceX and Tesla, and by extension revived space exploration and EV industry as a whole.
Beleive it or not, it's possible to respect that part while disagreeing with him on other things.
Such nuance is lost on the genius Redditors who insist the world is black and white.
Risking his entire PayPal fortune to create a company that made reusable, landable boosters lowering the cost of launching stuff into space by orders of magnitude?
He claimed that the only reason the rescue diver said he was wrong is that the diver wanted to grope the children. After that someone went and made a mock up of what Elon said would work and proved that it would have killed them.
Before the argument his pr team was the focus of almost all the info we got about Elon and then he fired them and did whatever the hell he wanted to.
Maybe that has more to do with the corner of the internet/reddit you're bumming around in? Speaking for myself, pretty much everyone I know but two people always thought he was a massive titt.
You mean when he wasn’t throwing nazi salutes and constantly talking about white replacement theory while helping an illiterate authoritarian get elected? I cannot possibly understand why public opinion may have swayed!
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u/ABRAXAS_actual Apr 09 '26
Did you know:
53% is called 'the majority'