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HOW DID ELON MUSK BECOME THE RICHEST PERSON ON EARTH?  
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Sam Pizzigati
October 22, 2024
Counterpunch
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_ Taxpayers like himself, Boot notes, are subsidizing the “fire
hose of falsehoods” that now appear on X, the former Twitter, the
social media app that Musk bought for $44 billion two years ago. Our
tax dollars have essentially supersized our world’s _

, UK Government – CC BY 2.0

 

Once upon a time, here in the United States, we taxed
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the rich. Significantly. Today, by contrast, we’re actively
enhancing their fortunes. Including the biggest personal fortune of
them all, the quarter-trillion-dollar stash that belongs to Elon Musk,
the current _numero uno_ on the _Forbes_ real-time list
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world’s largest fortunes.

Musk owes a hefty chunk of his own personal fortune to the taxes
average Americans pay. He just happens to be, notes
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a just-published _Politico_ analysis, “the single biggest
beneficiary of U.S. government contracts.”

Two of Musk’s commercial operations, Tesla and SpaceX, have received
billions in American taxpayer support. The federal government,
_Politico_ points out, has essentially “outsourced its space
program” to SpaceX, and Tesla, a shaky electric vehicle company when
Musk bought it, only “took off after receiving $465 million in
subsidies from the Obama administration in 2010.”

All the tax dollars that Musk has collected from the Defense
Department, NASA, and the U.S. intelligence community — coupled with
the “generous government subsidies and tax credits to the
electric-vehicle industry” that have so boosted Musk’s Tesla —
have Council on Foreign Relations senior fellow Max Boot fairly
fuming.

Taxpayers like himself, Boot notes
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are subsidizing the “fire hose of falsehoods” that now appear on
X, the former Twitter, the social media app that Musk bought
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for $44 billion two years ago. Our tax dollars have essentially
supersized our world’s single wealthiest individual.

Back in the middle of the 20th century, the United States took quite a
different approach to the money pouring into rich people’s pockets.
From the early 1940s through the mid-1960s, the incomes of America’s
richest faced a tax bite that would be unimaginable today.

In 1942, then-president Franklin Roosevelt proposed
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a 100 percent tax rate on income over $25,000, the equivalent of about
$484,000 today. Congress wouldn’t go along with that 100 percent top
rate. But lawmakers did give the okay to a 94 percent top tax rate
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on 1944 income over $200,000.

In the 1950s, under the Republican president Dwight Eisenhower, the
federal tax rate on top-bracket income never dipped below 91 percent.

Today’s top-bracket federal income tax rate? That stands
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paper, at 37 percent on income over $693,751 for a couple filing
jointly. But assorted loopholes have left the tax rate the rich face
on their actual annual gains enormously lower.

In 2021, a joint report
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from the Biden administration’s Office of Management and Budget and
Council of Economic Advisers calculated that America’s wealthiest
400 billionaire families, between 2010 and 2018, “paid an average of
just 8.2 percent of their income” — counting the gains in the
value of their investments — in federal individual income taxes.

“That’s a lower rate,” the report noted, “than many ordinary
Americans pay.”

Could we ever get back to anything close to Eisenhower-era tax rates
on the richest among us? This past March, the Biden administration
proposed
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a 25 percent minimum tax on the total income — including unrealized
capital gains — of the nation’s top 0.01 percent, households worth
at least $100 million.

About the same time, progressive lawmakers — led by U.S. senator
Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and representatives Pramila Jayapal
from Washington State and Brendan Boyle from Pennsylvania —
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Ultra-Millionaire Tax Act, legislation that would impose a wealth tax
on America’s 100,000 wealthiest households, our richest 0.05
percent.

Under this proposed legislation, wealthy households worth up to $1
billion would face an annual tax of 2 percent on their wealth over $50
million. Richer households would face an additional 1 percent tax on
wealth over $1 billion.

One of the Senate co-sponsors of that legislation, Vermont’s Bernie
Sanders, has also gone a step further and called for a 100 percent tax
on wealth over $1 billion.

“I think people can make it on $999 million,” Sanders told
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journalist Chris Wallace last year.

Sanders and one of America’s most famous deep pockets, Bill Gates,
have actually had a friendly
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podcast discussion over whether our tax rates should allow
billion-dollar fortunes to even exist. The Sanders proposal, noted
Gates, would tax away over 99 percent of his personal fortune. Gates
would be willing to let the IRS take
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62 percent, about $100 billion.

For a better America, that certainly might make a good place to start.

_Sam Pizzigati__ writes on inequality for the Institute for Policy
Studies. __His latest book: __The Case for a Maximum Wage_
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Among his other books on maldistributed income and wealth: __The Rich
Don’t Always Win: The Forgotten Triumph over Plutocracy that Created
the American Middle Class, 1900-1970_
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Stories Press). _

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* Elon Musk; Taxes on the Rich; Tesla; SpaceX;
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