(Washington Insider Magazine) -Elon Musk urged his Twitter followers recently to vote on whether he should sell 10% of his Tesla shares, while Ron Wygen, finance committee chair and the author of a proposed billionaire’s tax, blasted the message as a publicity ploy.
Elon Musk asked his 62.5 million Twitter followers last Saturday if he should sell 10% of his Tesla stock, further stating he would adhere to the poll’s findings.
In the hour after Musk tweeted it, it drew over 700,000 answers, with nearly 3.5 million votes when the survey concluded Sunday. Fifty eight percent said Musk should sell Tesla stock and 42 percent voted that he should not.
According to Reuters calculations, Musk’s holdings in Tesla is around 170.5 million shares as of June of this year, and selling 10% of his stock would equal to close to $21 billion based on Friday’s closing price.
Wyden has spearheaded the charge among Democrats to require billionaires to pay taxes when stock prices rise even if they do not sell shares, a notion known as “unrealized gains.”
Proponents of the tax claim that it would impact roughly 700 super-rich Americans, who would help pay for Joe Biden’s $1.75 trillion 10-year public expenditure plan, which aims to improve health and social care while also funding climate-change programs.
In announcing his idea last month, Wyden stated that America had two tax laws, one required and one optional. He was comparing employees who pay taxes with each paycheck to billionaires who postpone paying taxes for years, if not permanently.
When Wyden suggested his billionaire’s tax, Chuck Marr of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities used Jeff Bezos as an example, with Musk a challenger for the title of world’s richest person, to demonstrate how the concept would operate.
According to Marr, the Amazon founder would make contributions to the federal government based on unrealized profits from his stock holdings at $10 billion, rather than a declared wage of around $80,000.
The Biden spending plan, known as Build Back Better, that Wyden wants to help fund, is still stalled in Congress. House centrists are seeking a nonpartisan cost-benefit study, while centrist senators continue to reject many of its aims.
Democrats are divided on the proposed billionaire’s tax as well. Among those opposing is Joe Manchin, the West Virginia senator who, together with Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, is blocking Build Back Better, holding enormous influence in a chamber divided 50-50 and so controlled by Vice President Kamala Harris’ casting vote.
