Elon Musk to pay over $15,000,000,000 in taxes this year, the most in American history

The world’s richest man, Elon Musk, is about to pay the largest taxes in American history. So, where does the $15 billion figure come from? On November 6, Elon Musk launched a Twitter poll asking millions of his fans if he should sell 10% of his stake in Tesla to pay billions in tax liability. About 24 hours later, 58% of Twitter poll respondents said Musk should sell 10% of his Tesla stock. Musk abided by the results and started selling millions of Tesla stocks.

As of last week, Musk had sold 10.1 million Tesla shares for nearly $11 billion. However, Reuters’ analysis showed that the $11 billion sales only represent about 5% of the 10% stake Musk pledged to sell on November 6. On Monday, Musk sold another $906 million worth of Tesla shares. As of Tuesday morning, Musk has sold a total of 11.9 million shares, according to InsiderScore/Verity.

When all is said and done, Elon Musk’s stock sales could total $18 billion by the end of the year, which means, as CNBC explained, could lead to a tax bill of more than $15 billion in the coming months on stock options.

“From a tax perspective, he likely has another four or five block sales of 934,000 shares (the amount sold in each of the last tax-related sales) before he’s done for the year,” CNBC said.

One of Musk’s fans also shares this on Twitter.

https://twitter.com/JeffTutorials/status/1471146207523311616

Meanwhile, Musk and Senator Elizabeth Warren got into ugly Twitter spat over tax reform. Senator Warren accused Musk of not paying enough taxes. In a Twitter post, she said:

“Let’s change the rigged tax code so The Person of the Year will actually pay taxes and stop freeloading off everyone else.”

Musk responded:

“And if you opened your eyes for 2 seconds, you would realize I will pay more taxes than any American in history this year.”

Musk also added, “Don’t spend it all at once … oh wait you did already.”

And if you opened your eyes for 2 seconds, you would realize I will pay more taxes than any American in history this year

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 14, 2021

In the mean time, to put Musk’s tax obligation into perspective, his $15 billion tax payment is larger than the GDP of each of the countries shown below.