Clay Jones for December 19, 2021

Eh. Musk is perfectly okay with moving entirely out of the US. As long as he’s here, he has reasons to be here. As soon as it’s not in HIS best interests, he’ll be outa there before you can say “Tesla’s moving to Texas.”

Try “Greedy Musk”, the new fragrance from Elon Musk.

Warren: Come at me Bro!

Elon Musk’s father was wealthy and owned an emerald mine in South Africa. His mother was from Canada, but was raised in South Africa. Elon Musk moved back to his mother’s homeland to avoid the military draft in South Africa. Shades of Donald Trump! (But a lot smarter and much more successful in multiplying his father’s fortune.)

Elon Musk was successful in developing software, and made a fortune developing X.com and PayPal, which he then parlayed into a role in a new company founded by Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning. Musk did NOT found Tesla; he joined a company that was already being developed, and eventually ousted the founders and took full control himself.

Musk had developed enormous wealth DUE TO GOVERNMENT SUPPORT and government contracts, subsidies and guarantees. And there are certainly many legitimate public policy interests in developing clean, green, renewable energy.

But, while Musk certainly has demonstrated his own brilliance, imagination, drive and success, he has always developed his wealth on the backs of others — government, the public, and workers who transform his visions into actual products.

As with the late Steve Jobs of Apple, I love their vision and their products, but find much to dislike in their business practices.

Elon Musk has gotten rich off others all his life.

He can afford to pay his fair share of taxes.

Never happen, not if the republigoons have their way!

It’s been a long time coming to tax stocks paid as income. They should not be given the same benefit as stocks bought as investments.

As it is, I read an interesting article highlighting one of the ways the rich avoid taxes. They pay themselves in stocks that they don’t cash in. Instead they use those stocks to get loans to live off of. Getting loans to pay the other loans with. Sound familiar? Yup, that’s what Trump was doing, only he was doing it by over inflating the value of his properties for those loans, and likely made little to no effort to pay them off.

They avoid the estate tax, by putting any actual money and assets into trusts for their heirs, the proverbial trust fund babies. People that often are even worst in their contempt of the people that actually earn the money for their various companies. The same people who’s paid taxes fund the necessary infrustructure their companies need to succeed. Fund the courts they use to protect the interests of the wealthy corporate owners.

Frankly, it’s time to close those loop holes and stop the wealthy from freeloading on the backs for people that work for a living. At the very least, we need the politicians to pass this infrastructure bill that will, at the very least, get some tax money from those that can afford it the most.

I was considering purchasing a Tesla. I’ll wait until there are more EMV models on the market. None of my money is going to Musk.

Imagine being so bored with your wealth, you go on joyrides into outer space. Meanwhile taxpayers on Earth subsidize the food, housing, and healthcare of your employees because they don’t receive a livable wage.

Warren, with a net worth of over $12 million does not consider herself rich. She only wants people with more than her to ‘start’ paying taxes. I guess she feels ‘overtaxed’ herself.

I often wonder… exactly what do people like this really think that they need to have all that wealth for? It won’t keep them alive a minute longer when they are on their deathbed, they can’t take it with them when they die, and most likely, whoever gets it after they die will spend it, so why in Hell try to hoard THAT MUCH MONEY?? Live comfortably, sure, spend it when you are alive, sure, even have an expensive lifestyle, sure, but more people like that need to member what Andrew Carnegie said: “The man who dies rich, thus dies disgraced! I resolved to stop accumulating and begin the infinitely more serious and difficult task of wise distribution.” Also: “There is no class so pitiably wretched as that which possesses money and nothing else.”

Carnegie spent the first half of his life obtaining his wealth, but he spent the second half of his life giving it away!

Ted Turner had at least one good idea: change the lists of the richest people in the world to a list of the greatest philanthropists.

But that would mean there would be no reason to try to be the richest, hence the idea died a quick and quiet death.

Yes! I hope highly paid movie stars, athletes, high profile elites, politicians and industrialists who make millions a year all pay their share. Musk’s taxes will be in the billions he says. I can’t even imagine what it would be like to have that kind of money.

He or she who dies with the most toys wins.

It’s my understanding that to have reduced, to 20%, the top bracket of the Capital Gains Tax (a tax on money making money—so in essence a tax for those making money off the backs of the proletariat) is the biggest wedge for further dividing the classes…well, that and enough loop-holes to fill a Froot Loops factory.

Too late.

Musk can easily afford the extra income taxes he so detests, and will still earn billions more in the future. Warren and other progressives in Congress just want to make the very rich every so slightly less rich. Graduated income taxes worked well in America for many years after WWII, until Reagan and other Republicans decided that great wealth inequality was a good thing.