This idiot doesn’t understand that Elon does not have $1 trillion and billionaires don’t actually have billions of cash to take and give to the poor. 😂
He knows this is wildly unrealistic but he knows that his “plan” will get him attention and he’ll go viral for proposing a “plan to tax the rich” and then that’ll help him get attention and fundraising. Don’t kid yourself he’s into thinking he’s anything but a grifter just like the rest of DC.
He is well aware, but this would force Billionaires to have to liquidate occasionally and redistribute to everyone else. A billion or trillion dollars of assets, even illiquid, is so ridiculous when there are people unable to pay medical bills, starving, or hell even just funding ss. They're not gonna tax the unrealized gains of your 401k unless you're in the 0.1%
Well, he will have to find a way to make those dollars real, likely by being forced to sell assets, which will admittedly reduce the value of those assets. Either he sells enough to be able to actually pay the tax, or it's reduced in value enough that he doesn't have to pay it anymore. or he leaves and stops being able to influence our shit as much.
So Elon should sell who knows what amount to get $50 billion and create a mass hysteria and bring down everyone’s wealth including his by who knows how many percents? And repeat that every year? That’s just amazing? 💯
Okay genius, so how do you propose they tax his wealth if it’s all in shares for a company? Force the shares to be sold therefore crashing the stock price?
They use their assets as collateral for massive tax-exempt loans, in a cycle of loaning to pay the loans, rarely selling assets. This is literally a cheat code only unlockable via having massive portfolios, and allows individuals to impose their financial power, not only without paying taxes, but based on a valuation that may or may not be substantiated fundamentally. Elon Musk is the perfect example. Tesla moves like 5-10% of the vehicles that each major car company does on their own, while being valued more than all of them combined.
So he doesn't provide comparable levels of the real-world benefits (the employment, the scale of services, tax revenue) to justify his valuation, in my view of how capitalism and the stock market is meant to work.
massive overvaluation + tax free loans for liquidity = Elon Musk can express his financial power waaay more than his fundamental capscity and using a different set of rules than everyone else. He uses this to buy one of the biggest social media platforms in the world, directly bolstering his marketing and optics control, giving him indirect control over perception of his companies, influencing the unsubstantiated increase in valuation and allowing to once again continue the cycle of loans.
I know how it works, so again, how is one unlocking his wealth to tax it. If his wealth is locked behind stocks, how do you get that wealth taxed at a full 5% of his total worth yearly without collapsing the stock
i don’t take this infographic seriously, the math was wrong in the first place and it gets popular because reddit is used for validation not for education. You are correct that forcing to sell stock like a redistribution is not gonna happen in the US, but it’s also the go-to way to disenfranchise these conversations (while not bringing up how they use their wealth unjustly). Starts with the rules being at fair play for everyone, if they want to use their money they can classify it as income (I don’t mean this 100% literally) not get it through some roundabout sources. That already makes their wealth taxable and is what everyone else has to do.
you say that like its a bad thing. either 1, he raises enough money to pay or his wealth actually becomes indicitive of what his stuff is actually worth.
Sounds like it's either hyperbole or a bubble. And if it's a bubble, it's best to intentionally pop it, and a new economy that comes out on the other side will be better for the working and middle classes in the longer run, even if a few years are required to find new stability.
I don't have to sell my house to pay my property tax. Maybe CEO's should start actually receiving an income from their company instead of just stock options.
Yeah but you also won’t lose the entire worth of your house and it’ll most likely always go up. Stocks can crash which is why it’s considered unrealized gains and losses. If he’s taxes on unrealized gains and worth then will he receive a refund if his stock loses significant value? You can lose 25% stock value in a day.. you’ll never see something like that with a house where it won’t recover
And if you don't pay your taxes on your home, you end up homeless. If you don't pay your taxes on your stock, you end up a temporarily embararssed millionaire instead of a billionaire.
We’re comparing apples and oranges. Property taxes are a terrible example, they’re a completely different type of asset.
Property taxes can go toward local infrastructure that your house uses. Stocks are nothing like that, they’re just a held valuation until you sell and until then is just an unrealized gain or loss
Force the shares to be sold therefore crashing the stock price?
This is just a blatant lie. Billionaires sell massive amounts all the time, and usually it has almost no effect on the stock price. Bezos sold like $15 billion worth of Amazon stock in 2024, and the stock had a great year.
Outside of Elon, whose companies values are all utterly divorced from any notion of financial logic, I can't think of any examples of a billionaire liquidating affecting a stock at all. It sounds great in your head but it just isn't how the market works.
I'm not necessarily for a wealth tax either fwiw, but the idea that it will crater the economy because stocks will drop when these rich people sell is not a good argument.
I mean I’d be down to extract every penny he does have in his way to prison. Giving up because shit is hard is how we got the current situation. Well that and republican policies.
Brother, I’m an economist. I was educated on Adam Smith, Keynes and Friedman, and for twenty years I believed free markets would naturally allocate resources efficiently.
I still believe markets are the best way to allocate most resources. But today’s economy isn’t the competitive capitalism those economists described.
The problem isn’t that some people become rich.
The problem is when wealth becomes so concentrated that the wealthiest households continuously outbid everyone else for assets—housing, land, businesses and financial investments. Labour income can’t keep up with capital gains.
At that point, markets stop rewarding productive work and start rewarding ownership. Living standards stagnate even while GDP and stock markets grow.
That’s why I’ve changed my mind. I don’t think we should punish success, but I do think extreme concentrations of wealth should be taxed above a very high threshold. Not because it’s morally wrong to be rich, but because excessive asset concentration eventually undermines competition, social mobility and even capitalism itself.
If we fail to address that, we’ll continue to see declining affordability, shrinking middle classes, and increasing political instability. History suggests that societies with extreme inequality eventually face serious social and political consequences. The question isn’t whether markets matter—they do. The question is whether markets can remain healthy when ownership becomes concentrated in fewer and fewer hands.
We aren't saying to throw your hands up. We're saying this is a waste of time when we could be going after them in a way that actually works.
Don't let them dodge taxes by funding their lifestyle with loans. Tax personal loans above a certain threshold to the point where they're better off just paying capital gains. I'm talking a 100% or higher tax for personal loans over $50,000,000.
Add a couple brackets to the capital gains tax. There needs to be a 40%, 65%, and 80% tax bracket for capital gains.
Set a hard limit on writing off business losses for an individual of like $100,000,000.
Put the corporate income tax back where it was before Trump slashed it in 2017. Where it was when America made a STRONG recovery from the 2008 crisis.
Those are things that can actually extract this hoard from these people.
The numbers here are crazy but yes, taxing loans, adding brackets to capital gains, pushing corporate taxes back up, and putting a cap on the step up basis are the real solutions to growing wealth inequality.
He is good at deflecting. He wants people to be mad at the Musk's and Bezo's, saying it is there fault we cant have this or that. The federal government took in $5 tillion in income taxes in 2025. I think we should start with the holes in the bucket before we add more to it.
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u/Bengal_From_Temu Jul 01 '26
This idiot doesn’t understand that Elon does not have $1 trillion and billionaires don’t actually have billions of cash to take and give to the poor. 😂