Elon Musk has said he will pay over US$11bn in taxes in the remainder of 2021 following Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren accusing him of being “the world’s richest freeloader.”
Musk, Tesla and SpaceX chief executive, responded to Warren by saying he “will pay more taxes than any other American in history this year.”
It would also be the largest single payment to the Internal Revenue Service in history, according to Bloomberg News calculations.
Musk, who has a net worth of US$265bn as of a week ago, reportedly “paid nothing” in federal income taxes in 2018 and under US$70,000 in 2015 and 2017, said The Daily Mail.
This row comes as Musk was named Time Magazine’s Person of the Year after selling almost US$14bn worth of Tesla shares in the last six weeks, launching rockets into space, inventing new driverless cars, influencing the stock and crypto markets with his Tweets, and sharing his Asperger’s diagnosis whilst hosting Saturday Night Live.
Warren urged Musk to pay these taxes “on behalf of every public school teacher, every waitress, every computer programmer, every street cleaner who actually paid taxes, and that means they paid more than Elon Musk did.”