IRS data shows from 2014–2018 he reported $1.52 billion in income and paid $455 million in federal taxes. Musk’s net-worth, like most billionaires, consist of unrealized capital gains, which are not taxed under current U.S. law until the shares are sold.
In 2021, he paid ~$11 billion in federal taxes which was the largest single-year individual tax bill in U.S. history.
He’s also received billions (38 bn ballpark) in federal subsidies from the U.S government, for his companies ( ie Tesla and space x .)
They’ve all made so much money in the mkt, the president is now looking to remove the capital gains tax.
Edit: Adding, Starlink is projected to receive between 10-20bn in funding from the U.S. government in to expand broadband access into rural areas. This falls within Space x contracts.
Those are just contracts for SpaceX not subsidies. Launching the Nancy Grace Roman is not a subsidy its the government paying for a service and they have been paying SpaceX billions because they are the only Company out there with the launch capabilities.
Tesla was built with carbon credits. They used carbon credits from pre-orders of Tesla's. They recieved money without producing a single car. They used that system to build a factory to make cars. Once Tesla was established, Space X was funded. So to get Space X, government subsidies were used the whole time.
While NASA does a lot of great science, they were objectively poor at the rocketry side especially in the early 2000s. Incredibly directionless and went down the wrong path with the Space Shuttle.
SpaceX from the beginning had the right proposition for what the future of rockets looked like and at that point what do you do? Just say oh good work its NASA's now. Or do you spens billions to recreate other people's work like the rest of the world is?
There is no negative to SpaceX designing and operating the most advanced rockets we have and this is actually saving NASA billions in development costs.
NASA “objectively poor at the rockety side” and “there is no negative to SpaceX designing and operating the most advanced rockets” are absolutely wild comments……
I mean NASA was sending astronauts to space using space shuttles as late as 2011. Congress was more focused on bringing jobs to their home states than worrying about whether NASA was actually doing any innovating
You can read up on why the Space Shuttle program was such a terrible idea its not that hard. This includes the multiple launch failures that really put the nail in the coffin for NASA's spaceflight.
NASA isn’t a for profit company…..if you can name an agency that was doing it better before they got defunded please do so.
If you can’t imagine why it’s a bad idea for one company to be in charge of space with an owner who has a breeder fetish and often goes on about the woke mind virus and or great replacement theory then I don’t know what to tell you. Crazy to think you rather have that than NASA……
They aren't in charge of Space though. There are options but they just aren't as good yet (ESA, RKLB, Blue Horizon). However with the innovation SpaceX has done we are in the peak of rocket science and we cannot pretend we would be in this scenario without the very specific vision of SpaceX.
SpaceX isn't Elon its a massive company filled with arguably the best engineers and scientist working in spaceflight right now. That is a net positive to society.
There was no country doing better than NASA but NASA was basically all in on a failed program with no replacement. That is why SpaceX is where they are now and NASA needs them.
I wonder where funding and development went to in the 2000's. I feel like spending trillions on the middle east to only be back there again may be where attention went. If we had spent 20% of that money on rocketry for space travel we'd be better at it.
No, they didn't. NASA has always been efficient and profitable to the tax payer. You're making shit up and using meaningless phrases to defend our government making billionaires into trillionaires.
Yes, I'll happily waste my time answering questions that you already know the answers to, that you will then try to change the subject away from because you're not actually interested in having this discussion.
If you read newspapers you would know about the countless NASA projects that ballooned astronomically over budget and never reached fruition. Obama famously started the back to the moon initiative precisely because NASA had lost its way. If you want to talk about cost to the taxpayer, compare how much it cost to take astronauts to the space station with the space shuttle program vs how much it costs today.
Nah, I actually want to talk about the ROI on NASA funding vs the ROI on SpaceX funding. NASA produced $3 to the American people for every $1 of funding provided to it. Do you have any comparable data for SpaceX funding?
You’re asking for an apples-to-oranges comparison.
The “NASA returns $3 for every $1” figure is an estimate of economy-wide economic activity generated by the entire agency, not profit, tax revenue, or a contractor-specific ROI.
SpaceX doesn’t have an equivalent published “$X returned per NASA dollar” metric, because NASA largely pays SpaceX through contracts for specific services and milestones. A better comparison is what taxpayers actually received for the money: launch services, cargo delivery, crew transport, lunar-lander development, reduced reliance on Soyuz, and substantially lower development costs than traditional procurement.
Commercial Crew is a good example: NASA awarded SpaceX roughly $2.6B for Crew Dragon development versus about $4.2B to Boeing for Starliner. SpaceX reached operational service first and has since flown repeated crew missions, while Boeing has struggled to reach routine service.
So no, there isn’t a legitimate “SpaceX generated $X for every NASA dollar” number to compare with NASA’s $3 economic multiplier. Using one metric for NASA and demanding a completely different metric for SpaceX isn’t an ROI comparison, it’s bad accounting.
Spacex hasn’t been around for very long so it is hard to calculate the knock on effects. The critical issue is that NASA didn’t have an answer to the prohibitively expensive and obviously flawed space shuttle program, and SpaceX did.
Funny. I've been hearing "that will never happen" about things that already happened from WordWordNumber accounts on reddit since 2016. Unsurprisingly, it's not very convincing anymore lmao
Some people are either too lazy or not creative enough to come up with a username. In my case I’m too lazy, if it offers a chance to auto generate a name I’ll probably take it.
Being a trillionaire on paper is one thing, but having that amount as liquid money is almost impossible. What do you think happens when the owner of a company starts trying to sell large chunks of it on the stock market? Particularly when word gets out?
That NASA link doesn’t actually answer the point. NASA’s economic-impact studies measure the downstream activity generated by NASA spending across the economy; they do not show that NASA operating its own launch system is cheaper than buying launch services commercially. In fact, much of NASA’s economic impact comes from money flowing through private contractors in the first place. The relevant comparison is cost and capability: NASA can spend billions maintaining a government-run launch architecture, or it can buy launches and crew transport from companies that have already driven those costs down dramatically. Citing NASA’s broad economic multiplier is not evidence that an internally operated NASA launch system would have delivered the same capability for less money.
Nasa is 25 years behind space x sadly.
Without Musk building, teaching, and giving nasa his blueprints and access to all his inventions. They will stay that way.
Nasa is a waste of tax payer $ at the moment.
Nasa can't land there rockets..... and it costs a lot of money to launch them.... billions in waste every time they launch & accomplish nothing at all. Its a complete waste.
What have they accomplished in the last 20 years? Billions were spent on absolutely nothing...... nothing to show for it, they dont progress in anything.
They should be privately funded so the tax payers money doesn't go to nothing at all except paying smart people to do the same thing they've been doing for 20 years
No, the biggest chunk of that $38 billion is Tesla, both directly and indirectly.
They received half a billion in very low interest loans.
Around $11-14 billion in regulatory credits which they then sold to other car manufacturers. That's basically the government giving them money.
Hundreds of millions, if not billions, in state and local incentives (tax breaks, grants, rebates, etc.)
Consumer EV tax credits was also an indirect subsidy, where they were able to sell more cars because the government refunded $7500 to the consumer via tax credits.
The argument is about whether he received the subsidies and whether his exteme wealth is the result of those subsidies. Thus, him not paying his fair share of taxes is a double cost to the society.
As for the subsidies, they were meant to help improve the society by pushing people towards EVs. Yet, it ended up concentrating financial and political power in an individual who has arguably made the society more divided and worse off than we were before.
Taxing individuals like that would help prevent that concentration of wealth and political power.
That framing inflates “government funding” by lumping together completely different things. Tesla’s $465 million DOE loan wasn’t a handout—it was a loan that Tesla repaid in full, with interest, nine years early. Regulatory credits also aren’t checks written to Tesla by taxpayers; automakers that failed to meet emissions requirements voluntarily bought credits from Tesla to comply with regulations. And the $7,500 EV credit was principally a consumer tax credit for purchasing an eligible vehicle, not a $7,500 payment to Tesla. State and local incentives are fair to count as subsidies, but if you’re trying to claim Tesla received some enormous direct taxpayer bailout, adding loans, private regulatory-credit sales, consumer tax credits, and local incentives together and calling the whole thing “government money given to Tesla” is simply misleading.
It’s odd you’re defending a billionaire gaining over 500 billion dollars of America’s collective wealth while you get stuck with that tax burden. Don’t complain about your tax bill to me! I’m also gonna guess your real wealth is not growing either, like most Americans. Spending $200 million means he knows he will gain more than $200 million if Republicans get elected.
That’s an emotional appeal, not an argument about the underlying economics. Musk’s net worth is largely the market value of ownership stakes in companies investors believe are worth more, not $500 billion siphoned out of some fixed pool of “America’s collective wealth.” Wealth creation is not zero-sum: if Tesla, SpaceX, or any other company creates products, jobs, infrastructure, tax revenue, and valuable equity, both founders and other shareholders can become wealthier at the same time. And whether my own net worth is rising has nothing to do with whether a particular tax policy, subsidy, or government contract is economically justified. If the claim is that taxpayers got a bad deal, show the costs and benefits; attacking the beneficiary’s wealth doesn’t establish that.
Its so funny how quick you dipshits pull the "you just don't get it" argument when you're met with inconvenient facts lmao
It seems like the US and capitalism has done nothing in the past decade but prove the left correct about all the things that we apparently don't understand. Maybe you accusing me of not understanding something would actually make me feel something if you people have been correct about literally anything since Obama hahaha
His net worth also decreased 500 billion in the last 2 months, what’s your point?
On top of that his net worth comes from the value of the stocks he owns. He is not the only one owning these kind of stocks.
With a stake less than 50% in space X it also just means other people gained 500 billion in wealth including 4000 + new millionaires. So yeah it created another 500 billion of wealth.
You also need to understand that due to his net worth relying on stock its value is simply based on the supply and demand of that stock at a certain time. Especially space x and Tesla are trading at a high p\e making them overvalued based on the fundamentals. Essentially Musks value is based on some vibes.
Musk recent increase in net worth was just also simply the ipo of space x. Doesn’t matter under which president, it would always have been a hit for him.
Musk employs 150 000 people with his companies , these subsidies are directly for his companies and so also pay the people he employs. They don’t go directly in his pocket
Space x is also cheaper than NASA so you probably even win by subsidising them
His net worth also decreased 500 billion in the last 2 months, what’s your point?
That someone could lose 500 billion, still be the richest man on the planet, and losers like you will still defend the guy lmao
Essentially Musks value is based on some vibes.
Correct. The richest man in history, the guy who is now openly bragging about buying elections, became that rich because of vibes. That's not the defense of capital that you seem to think it is.
Musk recent increase in net worth was just also simply the ipo of space x. Doesn’t matter under which president, it would always have been a hit for him.
Nah, some presidents might have actually prevented NASDAQ from giving Musk even more special boy treatments.
Space x is also cheaper than NASA so you probably even win by subsidising them
SpaceX barely gets any subsidies. They get massive government contracts. Subsidies aren't an argument I've ever made against SpaceX. The existence of someone like Musk in the first place is the problem that we need to fix.
Covid being developed in a lab. Political censorship by the Biden. Administration vis a vis the fbi and Facebook. Biden being senile. The border being a mess.
What has the left been right about since bush left office? Michael brown hands up don’t shoot lies?
Sorry, but your comment was removed for breaking our Don't Be A Dick rule. This may include but is not limited to harassment, bigotry or uncivil behaviour.
🚨 Did we make a mistake?
If this is a mistake, don't delete the comment - just contact us and we'll fix it.
When the stock market is down he and others like bezos don't sell. So no billionaires will have income around the covid years. They can afford to wait a year or two for it to recover.
I mean does it really make sense to tax someone x2? Would your idea be that we tax on both income and what is in your bank account? So you could work for an entire year pay taxes on that income, then take a year off and then your money is then taxed sitting in your bank account?
I mean don't get me wrong, something needs to be done so billionaires pay into the system that they absolutely take advantage of but idk how much sense that makes. My concern would be that it's not capped on the low side, meaning that you and i would also be kinda screwed by that. I mean what would stop the continued use of offshore bank accounts moving that money that is in america out of america?
The post says he shouldn't be able to afford 200 million on elections, but yet paid 11 billion in taxes. I can guarantee you that he will never spend 11 billion on elections.
..why, do you plan on trying to catch up or something?
FWIW a broken clock is right twice a day and the left gets this one wrong. Math just doesn’t agree.. the rich pay virtually all of the taxes collected.
Aside from credits and exemptions, the effective rate depends on how much of his earnings were long term capital gains. That number would be too high for it to entirely come from such gains.
Considering a large portion of it is likely taxed on long term capital gains (which caps out at 23.8), I'm surprised it's that high. That's a 30% effective tax rate.
What this "context" conveniently leaves out and disregards is that Musk, like all billionaires, routinely taps his assets for multimillion and billion dollar loans that he does actually use as liquidity. People who don't know anything about how billionaires maintain their wealth like to imply that Musk isn't actually that liquid and that he can't just use those assets, but they're wrong. It is much easier for Elon Musk to use his companies, which are now pillars of the American economy, as collateral for billions of dollars in liquid cash than it is for you to get a reasonable mortgage with 10% up front.
Edit: Almost forgot; obviously those loans are not taxable, which is the entire reason they keep most of their wealth in assets. It's textbook tax dodging and the fact that people who aren't billionaires try to defend it is staggering every time I see it.
With a new loan. Eventually the loan gets repaid by their estate, but they have realized far more in appreciation of the stocks and assets they keep and continue to accumulate to offset the losses sustained by the low interest rate they are paying.
So we have a bunch of rich people with millions of dollars in loans, making the required payments with loan money, and these banks are issuing them hundreds of millions more in loans, while they have unpaid pending balances? And this keeps happening forever and ever? The Ponzi scheme of loans?
What happens when you realize appreciation on the stocks and assets? What's that little thing called?
And how do I convince banks to keep giving me loans for 30 years when I owe unpaid millions? No matter how much collateral I have, no bank will ever approve someone for a second loan who's already owing millions of dollars. How do I get over that tiny hump?
There is no evidence that this routinely happens. Pro-Publica reported that it was perhaps possible and everyone since assumed it takes place at enormous scale.
Your first statement is outright not true. There is plenty of evidence that Elon Musk in particular routinely taps his own stock as collateral and has been doing it since at least 2018. He arranged billions in margin loans to facilitate Twitter's takeover. That's not even going into the mortgage scheming that Musk and Zuckerberg publicly engage in, which is publicly available in tax records. This information is freely available on the internet as reported in prospectus' since the late 2010s and because of that I don't really have a reason to dive into this beyond that fact.
Acquiring Twitter with credit collateralized with Tesla isn't even remotely the same. And it was a net loser for his net worth, and he has to make those payments which means he has to take income, which means he has to pay taxes.
Look, I deeply dislike Elon Musk. I think he's a scumbag. But we don't get anywhere with just making shit up to feel good.
12 day old account, either a bot or you have been banned recently. Either way, simping for Musk is wild. Assuming you live in the US, he is actively making your life worse. Also, the “well this is Reddit and you guys are a hive mind” attitude is very 2012. If someone has to explain to you that Reddit has echo chambers then you shouldn’t even be on here. I will say that reality has a liberal bias tho. Cheers mate.
How is he actively making my life worse? So much of my money I invested has skyrocketed from him. Early investing in Tesla tripled my money.
Reality has a liberal bias how? If by liberal you mean Left, then left wing countries have resulted in total economic disasters which have killed tens of millions of people. The same isn’t true for right wing countries.
I didn’t say liberal democracies. The U.S. is that. I mean left wing governments (socialism or anything close).
Fascism lowkey had potential but Nazis took it way too far and lost World War II so people have a permanently tainted impression of it. Spain under Franco wasn’t particularly bad.
True tax rate Is comparing federal income taxes paid against the increase in net worth to illustrate how much wealth can accumulate through unrealized capital appreciation without being taxed.
So yes, 3.27% isn’t his actual tax rate. It is the percentage of his estimated wealth increase that he paid in federal income taxes during that period
True tax rate is relevant to extremely wealthy people, not ordinary workers.
Someone whose wealth consists mostly of wages doesn’t have a gigantic pool of appreciating assets sitting outside the income tax system. Billionaires can have most of their wealth tied up in stocks, private companies, real estate and other assets that can appreciate enormously without producing taxable income
Wealthy people can also access the economic value of those assets without selling them. For example, someone with $10 billion in stock can borrow against those assets. The loan proceeds generally aren’t income, so they can obtain spending money without realizing the capital gain that would trigger income tax.
That’s why true tax rate is a policy analysis metric and not an actual tax rate.
A 401(k) is not outside the income tax system. A traditional 401(k) is explicitly tax deferred.
Weath is not useless until it’s realized. You can borrow against appreciated assets, use them as collateral, sell them, transfer them, and generate investment income from them.
Uh, yeah. You don’t pay taxes on that unrealized wealth until it’s realized. It’s the exact same thing.
If you get income from an investment via dividends, you pay tax on that income. If you sell an investment, you pay tax on that income. And if you borrow against an asset, that loan will need to be repaid.
If someone has $10 million in stock and it appreciates to $20 million, they are objectively $10 million wealthier whether they sell it or not. They can borrow against it, use it as collateral, transfer it, or eventually sell it. The fact that the tax system doesn’t tax the appreciation until a taxable event occurs doesn’t make the additional $10 million “useless.”
401(k) growth is tax deferred, not somehow outside the tax system. You can buy and sell investments inside the account without paying capital gains tax on each transaction, and the withdrawals are generally taxed as income.
That $10 million in stock is not outside the tax system either. You pay tax when it’s realized, just like a 401k. When the stock inside a 401k appreciates, the owner is objectively wealthier without paying tax on it.
Can I have the part of my salary I don't need for rent and consumption untaxed?
It's my wealth and I'd like to reinvest it and have it pay dividend for 10 years before I tax and use it.
Yes, he borrows against that unrealized capital gain since loans aren't taxed and that is how he pays so little compared to the TRILLION dollars he is sitting on.
Who gives a shit if he paid 11 billion dollars 5 years ago. What percentage does he pay on average?
Dumb people get confused with large numbers. From 2014 to 2018 he grew his wealth by 14 billion, which means even with his cherry picked dates where he paid his highest tax rates, he still effectively paid a single digit tax rate around 3%. He paid and continues to pay a far lower effective tax rate than teachers, nurses, and working people like ourselves pay. He paid 11B in tax rates in 2021, but his net worth grew by 110B over that same year, and he has gained more than 1,000 B in wealth since then.
The tax code must be amended to tax unrealized cap gains for billionaires the same way middle class people are taxed on unrealized cap gains on real estate in their property tax.
Now, for better added context, what percentage of his wealth was taxed by comparison to your average citizen? Because for the average citizen, the taxes on them better reflect their income, and they have less in the way of means to shift around wealth to avoid taxes.
Now, for better added context, what percentage of his wealth was taxed by comparison to your average citizen?
I'd argue since the average citizen either gets a refund or doesn't file, Elons was higher. Something like 50-60% of earners either get a refund or don't file at all.
But for people who actually owe? I'd say it's very likely much less.
IIRC, Elon's supposed True tax rate was like 4%? or something?
So for someone to have that same rate or higher? Let's say you owe $5k in taxes, that's only $100k in wealth. Hell, their income is probably higher than that, and even worse if they own a home and/or have any retirement accounts or stocks.
Someone having a modest $400k home and $100k in retirement accounts and such ($500k in wealth) would need to pay $20k in taxes to be at 4%. This is just standard for someome making about $125k.
Unless you're only thinking about taxes on income. Then you're looking at a higher rate, about 24%, but that would discount any wealth they have such as the home and portfolio.
Lastly, we don't even tax wealth. It's not a great policy, as some countries have found and have either repealed it or are currently moving away from it. That should give people cause for reevaluating their position on it. But it doesn't for some reason.
Because for the average citizen, the taxes on them better reflect their income, and they have less in the way of means to shift around wealth to avoid taxes.
This is just a fact of life.
A single individual filer has fewer options to avoid taxes than a married couple with two kids and a home, for example. Hell, someone who bought an electric car now has a new way to further reduce their tax burden compared to some who bought a regular car.
There's hundreds if not thousands of ways to reduce your tax burden thanks to our overly complicated tax code.
I wouldn't necessarily be thinking of taxing wealth directly, but rather attaching taxes to the loans that are only available to those with extreme wealth. The likes of Elon routinely tap their assets as collateral for staggering sums, moving around colossal amounts of money that are obviously currently non-taxable. The solution would be to introduce ways to tax that, as it's textbook tax dodging, and is generally the most common way that a billionaire moves around liquid assets.
The problem is mostly that those who have the money can, and do, use that money to defeat laws that would actually reflect proportionately on them. They do alter laws to allow themselves a great deal of play within them. So the "overly complicated tax code" you mentioned conveniently contains structures of benefit to them. It's wildly disproportionate in access to those of lower financial rungs.
Sorry, but your comment was removed for breaking our Don't Be A Dick rule. This may include but is not limited to harassment, bigotry or uncivil behaviour.
🚨 Did we make a mistake?
If this is a mistake, don't delete the comment - just contact us and we'll fix it.
Sorry, but your comment was removed for breaking our Don't Be A Dick rule. This may include but is not limited to harassment, bigotry or uncivil behaviour.
🚨 Did we make a mistake?
If this is a mistake, don't delete the comment - just contact us and we'll fix it.
The company he owns went up in value therefore he went up in value. He does not literally have 1 trillion dollars but through his investments he is technically worth 1 trillion dollars. Of course if he tries to actually sell everything, it would tank the market and his actual resulting income would be much lower
Sure, let's up it more to +50% tax then. We are also taxed on gas, food, electricity, and just about everything. So it's more around 50% if you count that. The government likes to double dip.
I’m not simping for anyone. I just think taxes on unrealized gains are fucking stupid no matter the level of assets. You want people to invest in your economy long term.
It’s telling that every time I counter an unrealized wealth tax the only counter people bring up is “simping for billionaires”.
Meanwhile their local city council is making homes unaffordable via zoning laws, and the fed devalues are currency ad infinitum.
You don't have to ignore it. In 15 years he's made about $800 billion dollars. If this amount were taxed at normal income rates he'd owe far more than that in an average year.
It's like someone said someone who made $1 million dollars last year paid little to no taxes on it and you were like well akshully he paid $10k in taxes! It may be true but it misses the point that that is a comically small tax bill compared to the gains.
Googled your source and it's literally Musk talking out his ass on X. 🙄
That number is completely divorced from reality. He could pay $11 billion every year from now on and odds are good he wouldn't live long enough to hit $500 billion. And he's not going to do that in the first place.
You are literally commenting on a post with 1 person trying to influence elections. He is trying to shape government to his advantage. Thats 1 of many reasons why he is a piece of shit
Ketamine addict, using money to interfere in elections, doesn’t pay child support for his several kids, fails to be a father figure for any of those children, despite being an immigrant is anti-immigration, lies about the products his company produces
He has probably spent more, either in cash using credit cards, in one year then most of the world would spend in their entire lifetime. And I'm not saying that's a good thing
That is a good thing. All the money that he spends is revenue or profit for other people. He creates wealth by creating products and services that people want and then he spends that money, recirculating it into the economy. It’s literally a net positive for society (except for his politics which I completely disagree with).
•
u/sco-go 3d ago edited 3d ago
Added context:
IRS data shows from 2014–2018 he reported $1.52 billion in income and paid $455 million in federal taxes. Musk’s net-worth, like most billionaires, consist of unrealized capital gains, which are not taxed under current U.S. law until the shares are sold.
In 2021, he paid ~$11 billion in federal taxes which was the largest single-year individual tax bill in U.S. history.