Elon Musk's Feud With Elizabeth Warren Fully Explained
The gloves are off between billionaire Elon Musk and Senator Elizabeth Warren!
Things got heated on December 13 when Warren took a cheap shot at Musk after learning he was named Time magazine's 2021 Person of the Year. "Let's change the rigged tax code so The Person of the Year will actually pay taxes and stop freeloading off everyone else," she fired out in a tweet.
Musk, for his part, wasn't willing to take the criticism lying down and an all-out Twitter war promptly ensued. "Stop projecting!" he tweeted back along with a link to a Fox News op-ed piece wherein the author claimed that the senator pretended to be Native American in an effort to yield benefits from various affirmative action policies and practices. But he wasn't done there. "You remind me of when I was a kid and my friend's angry Mom would just randomly yell at everyone for no reason," he wrote. In yet another tweet addressed to Warren, he referred to her as "Senator Karen," and begged her not to call the manager on him. YIKES. So what's the catalyst behind this ugly Twitter feud, anyway? Just a heads up: the answer probably won't surprise you...
Elon Musk paid no federal taxes in 2018
It's all about the Benjamins, baby!
The feud between Elon Musk and Elizabeth warren boils down to one thing: cold, hard cash. Musk and Warren's Twitter squabble comes on the heels of the approval of President Joe Biden's "Build Back Better" plan, much of which is set to be funded by tax increases "from the very largest corporations and the wealthiest Americans." Per the plan's official site, "In 2019, the largest corporations in the United States paid just 8 percent in taxes, and many paid nothing at all." Case in point: Musk in 2018.
Musk is worth a staggering $297 billion, but according to a bombshell investigation launched by ProPublica he paid $0 in federal taxes in 2018. Still, Musk is adamant that he pays his fair share. "I pay a lot of tax. I mean, my marginal tax rate is, like, 53%. So that's not trivial. And then obviously there's asset-based taxes. The sales tax and everything else. There's also the estate tax. And generally, I think the estate tax is a good tax," Musk told the Wall Street Journal on December 6. Something tells us this feud is just getting started...