(RepublicanWire.org) – Elon Musk presented a few choice statistics to President Joe Biden via Twitter, who on Saturday tweeted a statement affirming his support for a minimum 25 percent tax on billionaires.
Musk, Twitter’s owner and founder of Tesla Motors, quickly pounced, citing a combined tax rate of 53 percent he paid on Tesla stock options at both the state and federal level. He added that he paid the most taxes of any individual in 2021, a claim that Forbes Magazine found likely to be true based on stock sales worth nearly $13 billion that year.
Musk’s response garnered nearly 30,000 retweets, over three times the number who retweeted Biden’s original statement. Readers added context to Biden’s tweet as well to show that the president’s claim relies on taxing unrealized gains on unsold stocks as income, something not eligible to be taxed under current IRS laws. Nearly 18,000 tweets were sent in response to Biden’s statement, a “ratio” that suggests more people disagreed than agreed with the statement.
Following up to his original tweet, Musk agreed that tax-avoidance schemes by the ultra-rich should be discouraged. He also called for ending GRATs, or grantor retained annuity trusts, a type of financial instrument often used to make high-dollar gifts to family members without being taxed.