Elon Musk has claimed he will pay more than $11billion in taxes this year after Elizabeth Warren accused him of ‘freeloading’ during a bitter war of words between the pair.
The Tesla CEO, 50, took to Twitter to claim he would be paying billions of dollars in taxes this year following a row with Massachusetts Sen. Warren over his taxes.
He wrote: ‘For those wondering, I will pay over $11billion in taxes this year.’
Musk could face a tax bill of more than $10billion in 2021, which could be the largest individual payment to the Internal Revenue Service, according to calculations by Bloomberg News.
It comes amid claims that Musk ‘paid nothing’ in federal income taxes in 2018 and less than $70,000 in 2015 and 2017, while Warren dubbed Musk ‘the world’s richest freeloader’ amid a row over the billionaire’s taxes.
Musk responded to her criticism by saying that he ‘will pay more taxes than any American in history this year’.
Musk is currently the richest man in the world with a net worth of $265.4billion, as of last Monday, followed closely behind by Amazon’s Jeff Bezos.
His company Tesla is worth about $1trillion and over the last few weeks, Musk has sold nearly $14billion worth of Tesla shares.
Musk and Warren’s war of words began after the news broke that Musk was named Time Magazine’s Person of the Year.
Warren tweeted last Monday: ‘Let’s change the rigged tax code so The Person of the Year will actually pay taxes and stop freeloading off everyone else.’
But Musk soon hit back, writing ‘Stop projecting’, and dubbing the politician and former law professor ‘Senator Karen’.
‘You remind me of when I was a kid and my friend’s angry Mom would just randomly yell at everyone for no reason,’ Musk continued.
‘Please don’t call the manager on me, Senator Karen.’
He also shared a link to a Fox News opinion article claiming Warren lied about having Native American heritage to benefit from affirmative action.
But in an interview with MSNBC on Wednesday, Warren clapped back, calling Musk ‘the world’s richest freeloader,’ and claiming he ‘evidently has a very thin skin’.
Joy Reid gave the Massachusetts senator a chance to respond to Musk’s now infamous ‘Senator Karen’ tweet.
The MSNBC host prefaced her interview by calling Musk ‘the absolute worst,’ highlighting his opposition to President Joe Biden’s Build Back Better agenda, and noting that, even though he has called for an end to government subsidies, electric vehicle subsidies helped Tesla get ahead.
Then, after quoting Warren’s tweet, Reid touted a ProPublica report, saying: ‘Its investigation found that in 2018, Musk paid nothing in federal income taxes, and less than $70,000 in 2015 and 2017.’
She then turned the conversation over to Warren to get her thoughts on Musk’s tweet about her, to which Warren replied: ‘The world’s richest freeloader evidently has a very thin skin.
‘But you know the part that makes me angry about this?’ she continued.
‘It’s 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 in federal income taxes.
‘And that’s just not right, and it means the system is broken.
‘But the days when these guys not only get to rake it all in, but then rub everybody else’s nose in it while they head off into outer space and declare how they did this all on their own when they were subsidized by the federal government and subsidized by every waitress and public school teacher who paid their taxes’ is over.
‘This is wrong and Elon Musk needs to eat a big dish of that,’ she concluded.
