The world’s wealthiest person had tweeted out a poll over the last weekend, asking his Twitter followers whether he should sell Tesla stock in order to pay more tax.
While 57.9 per cent of more than 3.5 million participants had voted “yes,” 42.1 per cent voted “no”.
“Much is made lately of unrealized gains being a means of tax avoidance, so I propose selling 10 per cent of my Tesla stock,” Musk tweeted.
In a subsequent tweet on Sunday, he added: “I will abide by the results of this poll, whichever way it goes”.
“Note, I do not take a cash salary or bonus from anywhere. I only have stock, thus the only way for me to pay taxes personally is to sell stock,” he further tweeted.
Musk had been a vocal critic of a proposal to tax unrealized gains on publicly traded assets in the US.
US Senator Ron Weyden (D-Oregon) responded to Musk: “Whether the world’s wealthiest man pays any taxes at all shouldn’t depend on the results of a Twitter poll. It’s time for the Billionaires Income Tax.”
Currently, 10 per cent of Musk’s stake in Tesla is worth around $24 billion, which he is going to have to pay taxes on.
If Musk were to sell that many Tesla stocks, it would likely have a significant negative impact on the price, media reports said.
American entrepreneur Elon Musk has once again reclaimed the title of the world’s richest man. ‘Forbes’ magazine said that Musk has made new records for himself – the only third person in history to amass a net worth of $200 billion.
In the process, Musk has now surpassed Amazon founder and fellow billionaire Jeff Bezos, who was earlier titled as the richest man in the world.
Now, according to a ‘Forbes’ report, Elon Musk sent a ‘short email’ stating that he wants to send Jeff Bezos a giant statue of the digit ‘2’, along with a silver medal – apparently mocking the fact that the Amazon founder had to settle for the number 2 position in the list of world’s richest men.
The two entrepreneurs are often seen having a celebratory rivalry. However, things got bitter as the space race between the two billionaires took a legal turn. Earlier, in August, Bezos sued America’s leading space agency, NASA, for giving a contract to Musk’s SpaceX.
Bezos became the first-ever to be worth $200 billion, in August 2020. However, Tesla shares surging led to Musk catching up and then becoming the world’s richest person in January this year for a brief period.
As per reports, Bezos and Musk have held the title back and forth multiple times in 2021. As of Tuesday, however, Musk has come to be the richest person in the world again, with Bezos coming in at the second spot and Bernard Arnault, chief of French luxury goods conglomerate LVMH, coming in third.
Alphabet, the parent company of Google, posted an all-time record revenue of $61.9 billion for the July-September quarter, along with record profits at $18 billion.
It said late last month that with respect to foreign exchange impact on reported revenues, it expects virtually no impact in Q4 in contrast to a 1.5 per cent tailwind in Q3 and 4 per cent in its Q2.
Apple hit the mark in April last year, while Microsoft reached the $2 trillion mark in June this year.
Amazon is also nearing the $2 trillion mark.
Microsoft is now worth a smidgen more than Apple, making the Satya Nadella-led cloud software giant the world’s most valuable company. Both companies are worth about $2.5 trillion.
Tesla, Elon Musk’s electric car giant, recently passed the $1 trillion mark and has since surged to a market cap of about $1.25 trillion.
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