I thought everyone knew this – but I guess it bears repeating since I’ve seen so many posts defending Elon Musk becoming a trillionaire.
CNN looked at how Musk got there, and the truth is Tesla and SpaceX don’t exist in the form they do today without government help. Our tax dollars ended up saving his ass several times.
Stop and think about that. The richest man who ever lived got a serious boost from government subsidies and contracts. Then last year he ran a task force to cut your services.
Here are the facts.
The Washington Post found that Musk and his companies took at least thirty-eight billion dollars in government contracts, loans, and tax breaks over the years. A lot of it came right when his companies were about to go broke.
SpaceX got more than five hundred million from NASA when it was almost out of cash. Tesla got a federal loan worth four hundred sixty-five million and billions more in credits that kept it alive.
A lot of people who’ve studied these companies say neither one becomes what it is today without that help.
And then there’s DOGE. Musk’s cost-cutting task force set out to save a trillion dollars. One nonpartisan group estimated his cuts may have cost the government around a hundred thirty-five billion dollars this year – firing workers, rehiring them, lost work – close to what he claimed to save. So he made his fortune on tax dollars, then ran a project that may have cost us more than it saved.
Well. I think it’s time for him to return the favor.
There’s a bill in Congress built for exactly this. It’s called the Billionaires Income Tax Act, H.R.5427 in the House and S.2845 in the Senate. Ron Wyden leads it in the Senate. And one of the House sponsors is Steve Cohen, who represents Memphis right now.
When you get paid, the tax comes out first. You don’t get a say – but billionaires play a different game. Most of Musk’s money is stock he never sells. On paper he never earns a thing, so there’s nothing to tax.
When he wants cash, he borrows against the stock instead. A loan isn’t income, so that’s not taxed either. Then he dies, his kids inherit the stock, and the tax owed wipes to zero.
People in finance even have a name for it.
Buy, borrow, die.
This bill ends it. It makes billionaires pay tax every year on their gains, the way you pay on your paycheck.
Fair is fair, so here’s the obvious worry. If you tax stock somebody hasn’t sold, what happens when it drops the next year? Did you just tax money that vanished?
The bill already has an answer, and it’s not complicated. For stock that trades every day, like Tesla, you settle up once a year. Good year, you pay. Bad year, you get it back. Nobody pays tax on money that’s gone.
For the harder stuff – private companies like SpaceX, real estate, things with no daily price – you don’t guess. You wait until it sells, then add a charge for all the years the tax sat unpaid. Think of it like interest on a loan he took from the rest of us. He can wait to pay. The waiting just isn’t free anymore.
That’s it. We already tax your house every year whether you sell it or not. This treats a billionaire’s stock the same way your county treats your home.
Now the honest part, because I won’t sell you something I can’t deliver.
One member of the House can’t pass this alone. It takes the House, then sixty votes in the Senate to get past a filibuster, then a signature. Those votes aren’t there right now. What a House member can do is sign on, keep the bill from dying in a drawer, and refuse to take a dime from the people fighting it.
A fix this plain has sat there for years because the people who’d pay it write the campaign checks. That’s why getting money out of politics is the first fight on my list.
This is right in our backyard. Musk’s Colossus supercomputer runs in southwest Memphis, in district 5, using our power and our water. The city expects somewhere around twelve million dollars a year in taxes from it, and the mayor wants a quarter of that to go back into Boxtown, a neighborhood that’s waited generations for basic repairs. Twelve million a year, next door, from a man worth a thousand billion. Do the math.
You helped place the bet. He walked off with the winnings. The least we can ask is that he pays what a Memphis nurse already pays on every shift.
Cohen has carried this fight in the House. I plan to stand right next to him on it. And I promise you this: I’ll keep fighting for it until we get it done.
Sources
- The Washington Post – Elon Musk’s business empire is built on $38 billion in government funding
- CNN – How much of Elon Musk’s trillion-dollar fortune came from the government
- CBS News – DOGE savings are a fraction of what’s claimed, analysis finds
- Partnership for Public Service – DOGE’s actions estimated to cost $135 billion this fiscal year
- Congress.gov – Billionaires Income Tax Act, H.R.5427 (119th Congress)
- Congress.gov – Billionaires Income Tax Act, S.2845 (119th Congress)
- WREG – Mayor’s proposal to direct xAI tax revenue into Memphis neighborhoods