Elon Musk says his tax bill this year will be $11 billion, and he’s probably right: The filings he has made with the Securities and Exchange Commission about his recent stock trades back up t…
Elon Musk says his tax bill this year will be $11 billion, and he’s probably right: The filings he has made with the Securities and Exchange Commission about his recent stock trades back up that massive number. Musk revealed the $11 billion total in a tweet Sunday that was otherwise short on details. This is not significantly different from what he had tweeted last week when, in the midst of a Twitter war with Sen. Elizabeth Warren, he said he’d pay the largest individual tax bill in history this year. [ns-video id=”5d727e837ce22ac93855b3e6b0f9509″ publisher=”21905″] That would be a massive change from some recent years. An investigation by ProPublica found that Musk, and fellow billionaires such as Jeff Bezos and Michael Bloomberg, legally paid zero in income taxes in 2018. Musk, the world’s richest person, doesn’t earn a cash salary or bonus. He’s instead been paid through stock options, giving him the right to buy shares of Tesla at a price equal to the market price at the time the options are issued, but likely well below their value at the time they are exercised. Musk received 25.5 million split-adjusted options in 2012, and had 22.9 million of those options vest over subsequent years as Tesla hit certain operational and financial targets.
