I never paid much attention to him before, so am rather late to the party. In buying Twitter he sort of forced himself upon me, and his fawning conservative followers and attempts to exacerbate political divisions got my serious attention.
Of course, today he announces he will step down as CEO but he will remain its owner, so the CEO reports to him. Maybe this will help his Tesla share price which has plunged 65% since he announced his interest in Twitter. Poor Elon.
This post is not going to be a complete history of Elon Musk, thats been done by others, just a brief highlight of Elon Musk as it relates to issues I feel important, and excerpts from some analysis I feel are insightful .
Of particular interest to me is the Right seemingly falling into the Cult of the Billionaire again (first Trump, now Musk)
Musk like Trump came from a family with money and has multiple divorces, whose father he describes as Evil and who himself is reportedly a low empath and not very nice despite outward appearances and a sense of humor.
Unlike Trump he was born outside the US and cant be President. His Grandfather was one of the leaders of the Technocracy Movement in the 1930’s before moving from Canada to South Africa to mine Emeralds or something.
Both Trump and Musk were in the Democratic orbit in the early chapters of their careers before changing to Republican. For Musk this seems mostly due to taxes now that he has to pay them, and opposition to unions and COVID lockdown policies. Otherwise, as you will see, he is like no Republican I ever heard of.
Musk says Climate Change is a serious threat, was a 2008 WEF Young Global Leader, desires World Government and wants to merge humans with AI to prevent AI from taking control. He is killing a bunch of monkeys in his efforts to eventually chip us humans.
He is a great lover of China and wants to turn Twitter into an Everything App like Chinas “We Chat” which will give Twitter lots of data they can sell (Watch The Circle for an idea where this can lead).
He seems to want to introduce a social credit system into Twitter which determines which tweets get amplified and which do not, consistent with his bizarre concept of Freedom of Speech but no Freedom of Reach, which is akin to the post office being allowed to accept your mail for delivery but choosing which of your mail to deliver based on social credit scores.
Elon is worried about depopulation so has something like 10 kids, but he is a homeless billionaire like his friend Altruist Nicolas Berggruen once was. He convinced the bachelor Nicolas to have his own kids sans wife.
Until recently he paid no taxes for a number of years and collected no salary just borrowed money using shares in his then profitless companies as collateral (sort of like FTX tokens). Musk supposedly had to take on an additional 13 billion in loans to secure Twitter , some carrying double digit interest rates. Like Trump, Musk is a cash poor billionaire. Unlike Trump he is now paying a boatload of taxes (billions in fact). Although maybe we will find out Trump pays a lot when his returns are released.
Musks secret history of working for Microsoft, his banking history at Paypal, followed by his capital intensive businesses in Space X and Tesla which could not have been possible without government (DoD, NASA, CIA,etc) contracts, loans and subsidies makes you wonder. Is Musk an Intelligence Asset? He does support CIA coups . “We can Coup anyone we want.”
To be fair, he is against ESG and the Woke Virus.
In any event, he is an interesting guy. Read on for links and details
Start with wikispooks
WEF Young Global Leader
https://web.archive.org/web/20221127171614/https://wikispooks.com/wiki/Elon_Musk/
The Bloomberg article mentioning Musk as WEF young Global Leader on Wikispooks now behind a paywall even on Way Back Machine Archive
1999 CNN promotion of Elon Musk accepting deliver of $1 million car. Of all the millionaires in Silicon Valley in 1999 during the Dot.com bubble, why is Musk being promoted ?
Musk at World Government Summit-2017
Musk's grandfather was Joshua Haldeman, who in the 1930s led the Canadian branch of the Technocracy movement
Musk, the only uniformly positive admiration and respect he’s consistently shown is for Communist China and its leadership, with whom Musk has partnered to help that country achieve electric vehicle supremacy.
Musk sharpened his criticisms of ESG investing earlier this month, tweeting: “I am increasingly convinced that corporate ESG is the Devil Incarnate.”
Musk’s record dealing with minorities should have given Taylor pause; according to California’s labor department, Tesla’s manufacturing plant some 60 miles away from Twitter’s headquarters engaged in racial discrimination practices so heinous that in reporting them the Los Angeles Times carried a disclaimer, warning readers of disturbing content.
As an aside, among Tesla’s directors is Kimbal Musk, Elon’s brother, who in 2017 was named a social entrepreneur by the Schwab Foundation, a sister organization to the World Economic Forum.
Elon is ok with CIA Coups for Lithium
Elon Musk officially owns no homes: Tesla CEO sells off lavish Silicon Valley estate for $30 million - $7.5M lower than its asking price - and fulfils his pledge made last year to 'own no home'
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10272863/Elon-Musk-officially-owns-no-homes-Tesla-CEO-sells-lavish-Silicon-Valley-estate-30-million.html
Read about another once Homeless Billionaire here
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/06/magazine/nicolas-berggruen-philosophy.html
Fifteen years ago Nicolas sold his homes, cars, and other possessions, claiming they weighed him down aesthetically. (He kept his Gulfstream IV.) He lived, he would say, out of a paper bag.
Berggruen Institute has technologists like Elon Musk and Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, as well as former treasury secretary Larry Summers. Its main focus is China, a country that clearly holds a personal fascination for Nicolas. "China's rise means the West will have to coexist with it if the world is to prosper safely," he says.
Elon Musk was the person who first raised the idea of children with Nicolas. A father of five [now 10], Musk told Nicolas, "You must!"
https://www.townandcountrymag.com/society/money-and-power/a5994/nicolas-berggreun-interview/
You can read more about Nicolas and Musk here
Musk worked at Microsoft, but doesn’t seem to want anyone to know about it. I wonder if he ever met Wei Dai (possible inventor of Bitcoin) who also worked at Microsoft in the 90’s
Monkey deaths in neuralink trials. . In 2022, the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM) alleged that Neuralink and UC Davis had mistreated several monkeys, subjecting them to psychological distress, extreme suffering, and chronic infections due to surgeries. Experiments conducted by Neuralink and UC Davis have involved at least 23 monkeys, and the PCRM believes that 15 of those monkeys died or were euthanized as a result of the experiments. Furthermore, the PCRM alleged that UC Davis withheld photographic and video evidence of the mistreatment.
In February 2022, Neuralink said that macaque monkeys died and were euthanized after experimentation, denying that any animal abuse had occurred.
Funny how Fauci was slammed for funding research abusing animals but the same folks slamming Fauci ignore Musk
Trump and Xi Promote Musk
The Wall Street Journal has previously reported that Xi Jinping, China’s leader for life, regards Musk as a “technology utopian with no political allegiance to any country.
U.S. President Donald Trump compared Tesla CEO Elon Musk to Thomas Edison at 2020 Davos
He told CNBC's Joe Kernen in an interview that "we have to protect our genius."
"You know, we have to protect Thomas Edison and we have to protect all of these people that came up with originally the light bulb and the wheel and all of these things. And he's one of our very smart people and we want to cherish those people," the president said.
Trump's comments came after a recent surge in Tesla's shares, which have more than doubled since September 2019
Supports Global Government and hyper localization replacing globalization at Davos
https://opaliving.medium.com/elon-musk-the-vision-of-the-world-economic-forum-f90be6571fa6
Example of hyper localization
They will be dividing the city of Oxford into six different zones, and people will only be given a limited number of times that they will be allowed to cross between the zones in their car.
All residents will be forced to register their car with the council. Number plate recognition cameras set up in the city will MONITOR how many times you leave your zone.
In fact, private cars will be banned altogether from crossing between the zones unless you buy a permit which will allow you a maximum of 100 crossings per year! Oh, how generous.
Those without a permit or if you drive between the zones after having reached your limit of 100 crossings, you will be fined £70 per crossing.
This is all being done in the name of climate change, aiming to stop people to take ”unnecessary” journeys and force people to walk or take the bus instead.
https://www.oxfordmail.co.uk/news/23073992.traffic-filters-will-divide-city-15-minute-neighbourhoods/
Freedom of speech but not freedom of reach
https://www.forbes.com/sites/dereksaul/2022/11/18/freedom-of-speech-but-not-freedom-of-reach-musk-reinstates-kathy-griffin-and-jordan-peterson-amid-new-policy---but-not-trump-yet/?sh=265ed520348a
The Supreme Court Disagreed in 1965. The right tonFreedom of Speech includes Freedom of Reach
1965—175 years after its creation—that the Supreme Court finally struck down a federal law on free speech grounds. This little-known decision set a path-breaking precedent for civil liberties and against intrusive government surveillance.
Unlike other Supreme Court dramas, the case featured an unlikely antagonist: the U.S. Post Office. Under a provision of the 1962 Postal Service and Federal Employees Salary Act, the Post Office screened incoming mail from foreign countries. Government officials would then examine all mail, except for sealed letters, for “communist political propaganda.” The Post Office would then notify the addressees, who had 20 days to request delivery. Otherwise, the government would destroy the “propaganda.” When replying, recipients could inform the Post Office that they wanted to receive any “similar publication” in the future. The Post Office even kept a list of those who wanted to receive such mail.
On May 24, 1965, the Supreme Court struck down the law as unconstitutional. Writing for a unanimous court, Justice William Douglas ruled that the law was “a limitation on the unfettered exercise of the addressee’s First Amendment rights.” The High Court found that being compelled to go on record as requesting delivery of controversial political tracts “amounts, in our judgement, to an unconstitutional abridgment of the addressee’s First Amendment rights. The addressee carries an affirmative obligation which we do not think the Government may impose on him.”
Just as crucially, Justice Douglas declared that the requirement “is almost certain to have a deterrent effect” on the free speech rights of Americans.
In a concurrence, Justice William Brennan went further and explicitly called the “the right to receive publications…a fundamental right.” Just as the government may not prohibit speech, nor may it inhibit speech. As he eloquently phrased it, “The dissemination of ideas can accomplish nothing if otherwise willing addressees are not free to receive and consider them. It would be a barren marketplace of ideas that had only sellers and no buyers.”
Wants to make Twitter the Everything App. Read or watch The Circle
The Circle | Official Trailer | Own it Now on Digital HD, Blu-ray™ & DVD
Elon Musk to bring the Social Credit system to Twitter
https://www.corbettreport.com/musk/
Climate change is the biggest threat that humanity faces this century, except for AI,” he continues. “I keep telling people this. I hate to be Cassandra here, but it’s all fun and games until somebody loses a fucking eye. This view [of climate change] is shared by almost everyone who’s not crazy in the scientific community.”
“He is a humanist—not in the sense of being a nice person, because he isn’t,” says Robert Zubrin, founder of the Mars Society, who met Musk in 2001, when the young, newly minted dot-com millionaire sent a large unsolicited check to the organization. “He wants eternal glory for doing great deeds, and he is an asset to the human race because he defines a great deed as something that is great for humanity. He is greedy for glory. Money to him is a means, not an end. Who today evaluates Thomas Edison on the basis of which of his inventions turned a profit?
A $465 million federal loan in 2010 helped prop up Tesla at a crucial juncture, and its customers have benefitted from hefty tax incentives.
For 2021 was the year of Elon Unbound. In April, SpaceX won NASA’s exclusive contractto put U.S. astronauts on the moon for the first time since 1972
His companies have faced allegations of sexual harassment and poor working conditions; in October, a federal jury ordered Tesla to pay $137 million to a Black employee who accused the automaker of ignoring racial abuse
Former associates have described Musk as petty, cruel and petulant, particularly when frustrated or challenged. He recently separated from the experimental musician Grimes, the mother of his seventh son. “He is a savant when it comes to business, but his gift is not empathy with people,” says his brother and business partner Kimbal Musk.
In 2018, the Chinese government repealed a law against foreign ownership to allow Musk to build a factory in Shanghai. Now Tesla appears to make about half of its cars in China, but it risks losing its hold on the world’s largest car market as the one-party state turns to favor homegrown rivals like NIO and BYD. Musk has faced criticism for pandering to America’s increasingly assertive authoritarian rival. “Overall, Tesla has a good relationship with China,” Musk told a business conference on Dec. 6. “I don’t mean to endorse everything China does.”
Musk’s mother was a model and his father was a monster. Born in Pretoria in 1971, Elon was prone to long silences and speed-reading the encyclopedia.
His parents divorced when Musk was 8. After the divorce, Elon and brother Kimbal went to live with their father. Errol Musk was a brilliant engineer and entrepreneur; he was also, in Elon’s telling, an “evil” man who tormented the boy psychologically in ways Musk still finds painful to discuss. Errol Musk told Rolling Stone he once shot and killed three armed robbers who broke into his home. In 2017, Errol later acknowledged, he fathered a child with his ex-stepdaughter, 42 years his junior. Musk has said he no longer has contact with his father.
Family and friends say Musk is sensitive and can take slights personally—particularly attacks on his wealth and media reports he views as unfair. Having pledged on Twitter this year that he would no longer own a residence, Musk has sold off his seven houses and considers his primary home a rental near the Starbase site in Boca Chica, Texas.
Musk has disavowed terrestrial political affiliations and maintained good relations with politicians of both parties, including Presidents Obama and Trump, though he quit the latter’s business council after only a few months over the decision to pull out of the Paris climate accords. Of President Joe Biden, he says, “I don’t think he’s doing an amazing job, but I don’t know—it’s hard to tell.” He has an ardent following in some of the nastier precincts of the far right, but Musk claims that when he tweeted “Take the red pill” last year, he had no idea that “red-pilling” was a right-wing dog whistle: “I was just referring to The Matrix,” the movie from which the meme derives.
A recent ProPublica investigation found that Musk and many others in his tax bracket paid no individual federal taxes as recently as 2018 because they had no income, only assets. In October, Senate Democrats considered imposing a “billionaires’ tax” on wealth. When Democratic Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon tweeted in support of it, Musk responded with a vulgar insult of Wyden’s appearance in his profile photo
Musk’s belief in progress is not absolute. He has been outspoken about confronting what he sees as the dangers of out-of-control artificial intelligence, and cofounded the AI companies Neuralink and Open AI to advance that goal. He finds cryptocurrency interesting and can talk endlessly about the conception of money as “an information system for resource allocation.” But he doubts that crypto will replace fiat currency, and disavows responsibility for the way his tweets have sent markets into a tizzy. “Markets move themselves all the time,” he says, “based on nothing as far as I can tell.
https://time.com/person-of-the-year-2021-elon-musk/
Per the New York Times, the National Labor Relations Board ruled in 2019 that “Tesla had illegally fired a worker involved in union organizing and that the company’s chief executive, Elon Musk, had illegally threatened workers with the loss of stock options if they unionized.”
Where did Musk threaten employees who wanted to unionize? On Twitter! (“Why pay union dues & give up stock options for nothing?” he wrote.)
In September 2018, Musk smoked pot while appearing on Joe Rogan’s podcast. It was a 420 kind of year for the middle-aged billionaire; less than two months earlier, he had tweeted, “Am considering taking Tesla private at $420. Funding secured.”
Musk’s 420 tweet had serious consequences, since he hadn’t actually secured funding, and lying about things of that nature are big no-no with the SEC. Musk was ousted as Tesla’s chairman and fined $20 million. As part of his settlement with the SEC, Musk had to agree “to have his tweets reviewed by Tesla’s in-house counsel,” an agreement he almost immediately violated.
Responding to a screenshot of a CNN headline that read, “2% of Elon Musk’s wealth could help solve world hunger, says director of UN food scarcity organization,” Musk tweeted that if the U.N. World Food Program “can describe on this Twitter thread exactly how $6B will solve world hunger, I will sell Tesla stock right now and do it.”
WFP director David Beasley called his bluff, and actually outlined how the organization would use the $6.6 billion. Musk, who is worth approximately $239.2 billion, never responded to Beasley. Less than a year later, he bought Twitter for $44 billion, ending world troll hunger instead.
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2022/04/11-weird-and-upsetting-facts-about-elon-musk.html
Elon Musk believes that a “woke mind virus” has infected the body politic. He thinks that COVID containment policies were “fascist,” that the New York Times is a “lobbying firm for far left politicians,” that trans people asking others to use their preferred pronouns is “neither good nor kind,” and that Anthony Fauci should be prosecuted. He encouraged his followers to vote Republican in this year’s midterms and has endorsed Ron DeSantis for president in 2024.
American liberalism is multifaceted. It has a welfarist component (which aims to shave the hard edges off the market economy by financing social insurance through progressive taxation), a pro-labor aspect (which aims to mitigate the power imbalance between workers and owners), a social-justice element (which aims to equalize the social status of marginalized groups), and a developmentalist ethos (which aims to promote economic modernization through public investment and subsidies to private industry).
This last dimension drew both Trump and Musk into the Democratic orbit in the early chapters of their careers. In the Reaganite 1980s, real estate was one of the few industries to maintain strong support for the Democratic Party, as the political scientists Thomas Ferguson and Joel Rogers documented. This was partly because Democrats retained political dominance in the major cities where development promised the highest returns. But it was also because urban developers like Trump stood to benefit from federal investment in cities and mass transit, which would increase the valuation of their properties. As a result, Trump bankrolled many Democratic politicians and maintained warm relations with liberal power brokers before his entrance into conservative politics
Musk also benefited greatly from liberalism’s interest in guiding economic development. The Democratic Party has long been committed to expediting the maturation of the electric vehicle and renewable-energy sectors through public subsidies. And that made Tesla’s rise possible. As of 2012, conservatives were deriding Musk’s company as “a prodigious harvester of government favors and handouts,” while the GOP’s presidential nominee was deriding Tesla as a bad investment on national television. It is therefore unsurprising that Musk was a Democratic voter in the Obama era, one whose political donations tilted left.
If Musk and Trump appreciated liberalism’s commitment to public investments that aided their private interests, however, they had less enthusiasm for the creed’s other components. Neither mogul has much fondness for progressive taxation or workers’ rights. For decades, Trump was one of our nation’s most creative tax avoiders and wage thieves.
Musk, meanwhile, illegally fired a Tesla worker who was trying to organize a union, and discouraged other workers from organizing over Twitter in 2018. He has also voiced a preference for “small government,” and has reacted hostilely to proposals for raising top tax rates. When Elizabeth Warren called for fixing the “rigged tax code” so that Musk would “actually pay taxes” in 2021, the Tesla CEO indignantly replied that he had paid “ more taxes than any American in history this year.” He then added, “Don’t spend it all at once … oh wait you did already,” apparently conveying his low opinion of the American Rescue Plan’s transfer payments.
But one’s politics are rarely determined by material interests alone.
And Trump and Musk are not merely businessmen who desire public subsidies, low taxes, and docile workers. They are also, by all appearances, thin-skinned narcissists with insatiable appetites for attention and public adoration.
, Trump found that he could give the conservative base what it wanted (e.g., racist conspiracy theories about Barack Obama) and that it could give him what he wanted (unqualified admiration). This led Trump to spend more and more time in the right-wing-media ecosystem. And as he did, he came to share its preoccupations, resentments, and truth claims.
A similar process seems to have sped Musk’s path to conservatism. Granted, the billionaire’s rightward turn can be partly ascribed to contingent events. The pandemic heightened the contradictions between Musk’s business interests and liberal governance. Tesla’s CEO was an adamant opponent of COVID containment policies, who predicted in March 2020 that there would be “close to zero new cases in US too by end of April.” He therefore did not take kindly to California’s relatively heavy-handed approach to the pandemic, which involved shutting down production at Tesla’s factory in Fremont. Musk derided these policies as “fascist” and threatened to relocate his company to Texas to escape them.
Of course, any compulsive Twitter user who took this point of view in 2020 was liable to earn applause from the right and jeers from the left. And over the ensuing two years, Musk found himself attracting slights from liberals on several other fronts.
In August 2021, the Biden administration convened a summit on electric vehicles and declined to send Tesla an invitation. At a tech conference the following month, Musk complained that Biden “didn’t mention Tesla once and praised GM and Ford for leading the EV revolution. Does that sound maybe a little biased?” before adding, “Not the friendliest administration, seems to be controlled by unions.” Shortly thereafter, Warren published her call for hiking Musk’s income taxes, so that he would stop “freeloading off everyone else.”
In March of this year, Musk found himself once again deprecated by contemporary liberalism, this time for allegedly sexually harassing a SpaceX flight attendant (and then paying her $250,000 to keep quiet). Musk attempted to preemptively discredit Insider’s exposé on that subject by characterizing it as a “dirty trick” perpetrated by the Democrats, who had now become “the party of division & hate.
Musk has taken to trolling prominent progressives like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Warren, replying to far-right provocateurs like Ian Miles Cheong, decrying Twitter’s erstwhile verification system as modern-day feudalism, issuing apocalyptic warnings about declining birth rates, lamenting the tyranny of Twitter bios that include pronouns, calling for Anthony Fauci’s prosecution, and libelously branding gay liberals as pedophiles, among other pastimes of the Twitter right.
The commonalities between Trump’s and Musk’s politics do not end with their mutual radicalization via the pursuit of likes and retweets. Both men also advertise a commitment to free speech that amounts to little more than a plea for personal license. Trump is surely more hypocritical in his critiques of political correctness, given that the former president has endorsed all manner of draconian restrictions on religious practice and freedom of expression. But Musk’s avowed commitment to open discourse is also highly context dependent, with the mogul forcing former Tesla employees to sign indefinite nondisclosure agreements, stonewalling media critics, and, apparently, suspending Twitter accounts that mock him.
Finally, and most alarmingly, both Musk and Trump have a penchant for describing progressive cultural power as an existential threat to the nation (if not the human race) in terms redolent of fascist oratory. “The woke mind virus has thoroughly penetrated entertainment and is pushing civilization towards suicide,” Musk recently declared.
To be sure, Musk does not endorse every item on the Republican agenda. But then neither do most GOP voters, including Donald Trump circa 2015. And Musk’s deviations from conservative orthodoxy are not random. As evidence for the elusiveness of Musk’s politics, Jeremy Peters cites the CEO’s opposition to restrictions on H-1B visas, which facilitate the immigration of high-skilled workers. But this position is a natural extension of Musk’s business interests. As an employer of high-skill labor, Musk has an interest in increasing the supply of such workers. And as a notably exploitative employer, meanwhile, he is liable to have a special fondness for laborers whose immigration status hinges on their employment, and who therefore have greater difficulty resisting unfavorable terms or conditions.
Similarly, Musk’s dissonant affection for the Chinese Communist Party betrays Tesla’s financial imperatives, not Musk’s philosophical quirks.
Likewise, Musk’s opposition to Trump’s climate policies wasn’t the product of an odd ideological idiosyncrasy but rather Tesla’s mercenary interests. This is not to say that Musk only believes in climate science because he runs a green tech company; he probably would not have taken over Tesla if he had not already believed in the greenhouse effect. The point is just that Musk’s present politics generally reflect a balance between his business interests and the ideological preoccupations of a sycophantic social-media community. Regardless, Musk’s current position on climate policy — that the U.S. should “increase oil & gas output” in the near term while investing in green energy for the long run — is officially shared by many Republican officials.
In arguing that Musk cannot simply be described as a conservative, Peters writes that Musk’s commentary is more “spiritedly anti-left than ideologically pro-right,” and that he “is more clear about what he is against than what he is for.” Yet one could say the same about much of the contemporary Republican Party. After all, the GOP did not produce a formal platform in 2020, while its standard-bearer told voters virtually nothing about what he intended to do with another four years in office, opting instead to run against the crime wave that he was himself presiding over.
None of this is to say that Musk’s politics are literally indistinguishable from Trump’s. In addition to his disparate views on climate and immigration, Musk claims a more ambitious (if ambiguous) ideological project than the former president ever did. For the most part, Trump has always sought his own aggrandizement as an end in itself. Musk seems genuinely concerned with humanity’s long-term fate, even if this preoccupation may function principally to rationalize his own egoism and self-importance.
More basically, Musk’s political views are bound to be more heterodox than Trump’s current ones, since the Tesla CEO has never faced the conforming pressures of seeking a political party nomination, which blunted many of Trump’s own heretical impulses in 2016.
Nevertheless, like Trump, Musk is a businessman whose appreciation for public subsidies pulled him left, before his antipathy for unions, taxes, and social-justice politics — and hunger for online sycophants — pulled him right.
Musk may still prefer to style himself as a nonpartisan independent. But he is a DeSantis supporter who directs the lion’s share of his campaign contributions to Republicans, opposes tax increases and labor organizing, and insists that a “woke mind virus” threatens humanity with extinction. In 2022, that makes him a conservative. It is that simple.
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2022/12/is-elon-musk-conservative-donald-trump.html
New York CNN Business —
Elon Musk appears to have wrapped up a busy year of trading his Tesla shares Tuesday. He’ll end up with one of the largest tax bills in history to show for it.
The Tesla CEO exercised options to buy another 1.6 million shares, and sold 934,090 of those shares for $1 billion to cover the tax bite he’ll be facing on that purchase.
The trades completed the exercise of the 22.9 million options he held that were due to expire in August. He sold off 10.3 million of the shares he acquired thoughout the process to cover his tax withholding requirements. And he did it using a pre-arranged plan that allows company insiders to sell shares in such a way that they can’t be accused of trading on insider information.
Musk was granted the options in 2012 as part of his pay package, and the options vested as Tesla (TSLA) hit various financial and operational targets in subsequent years. But he did not have to pay taxes on the options until he exercised them, which he started to do in November.
The value of the shares he acquired by exercising the options, less the nominal purchase price of $6.24 a share, will be taxed equal to $23.5 billion of regular income, a substantial sum, but still modest for the world’s richest person, whose net worth Forbes has estimated to be $280 billion. With a top tax rate of 40.8%, he faces of a federal tax bill of about $10.7 billion from the exercise of these shares.
Although Musk could have waited until 2022 to exercise these options, he faced the risk of an 8 percentage point higher tax bill if Congressional Democrats and the Biden administration pass the Build Back Better legislation. Although that bill currently appears unlikely to become law, it was still very much in play when Musk set up his pre-arranged trading plan, meaning there was still a significant risk of a higher tax bill if he waited until next year.
In early November, Musk also sold an additional 5.4 million shares that he had held in trust. The total 15.7 million shares he sold this year put some downward pressure on the price of Tesla (TSLA) stocks, as the average sale price he received on Tuesday of $1,091.73 is down 11% from the record high close before the start of his trades. But Tesla (TSLA) shares have rallied in the last week and are up 54% so far this year through Tuesday’s close.
A record tax bill
Those 5.4 million shares Musk sold out of his trust are most likely shares he held since the time of the company’s 2010 initial public offering, stocks he received in return for investments he made in Tesla in its early days. Rather than being taxed as income, the proceeds of those sales will be taxed at the lower, long-term capital gains rate of 20%. But that will still increase his taxes by $1.2 billion, bringing his 2021 federal tax bill to $10.7 billion.
Earlier this month, Musk said in a series of tweets that his $11 billion in taxes would be the largest single-year tax bill ever paid by any individual.
But that’s quite a change from his previous tax bills. Since he receives no cash salary or bonus from Tesla, it is likely he had little or no taxable income in most recent years. An investigation by ProPublica found that Musk and some of his fellow billionaires, including Amazon (AMZN) founder Jeff Bezos and former New york City mayor Michael Bloomberg, paid zero income taxes in 2018. Those revelations prompted some Democrats to call for a “wealth tax” on the holdings of the nation’s richest people, rather than just their incomes.
Musk started selling off some of his shares in November after he conducted a poll on Twitterasking his millions of followers if he should sell 10% of his Tesla stock in order to raise his taxable income. The poll said he should.
https://edition.cnn.com/2021/12/29/investing/elon-musk-tesla-stock-sales/index.html
The world’s richest man [Elon Musk] suggested in an interview that hostilities between the two could be resolved if Taipei handed some control of the democratically governed island to Beijing, prompting praise from China and predictable outrage in Taiwan.
“My recommendation … would be to figure out a special administrative zone for Taiwan that is reasonably palatable, probably won’t make everyone happy,” Musk told the Financial Times in an interview published on Friday. “And it’s possible, and I think probably, in fact, that they could have an arrangement that’s more lenient than Hong Kong.”
China’s ambassador to the United States, Qin Gang, thanked Musk for his suggestion in a tweet Saturday, calling for “peaceful unification and one country, two systems.”
But Taiwan’s representative to the US, Bi-khim Hsiao, wrote: “Taiwan sells many products, but our freedom and democracy are not for sale.”
https://edition.cnn.com/2022/10/10/media/elon-musk-china-taiwan-intl-hnk/index.html
Mr. Musk has pledged 54% of his Tesla shares, worth about $15 billion on Friday, as collateral on loans at the end of last year, according to the April 28 filing. That compares with 40% a year earlier. How much, if any, of Mr. Musk’s shares of SpaceX are pledged is unknown, though court records indicated he has used some of those shares as collateral in the past.
Tesla’s board has capped how much Mr. Musk can borrow at 25% of the value of whatever shares he pledges as collateral.
As of February, Mr. Musk had outstanding loans that totaled $548 million through credit lines from Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Bank of America Corp., according to regulatory filings disclosing his relationship with banks that serve Tesla. His total borrowing from all sources couldn’t be learned. Mr. Musk didn’t respond to questions about this personal debt.
Before Tesla went public, Mr. Musk told a judge during a contentious divorce with his first wife that he had run out of cash and had taken on emergency loans from friends to support his family and pay living expenses.