mredofcourse t1_j8oskma wrote on February 15, 2023 at 9:40 PM

Reply to comment by jsonh88 in Elon Musk donates almost $2bn of Tesla shares to charity by Nergaal

It's less than 1% of his net worth.

It's a tax write off.

It's essentially him saying, "Instead of paying my ridiculously low relative share of taxes, I'm going to take as much of that money as I can and allocate it to causes I want to further in my own personal interests".

Since it's not transparent, we don't know how much is being given to things like AI research or other things where he may be directly benefiting from those donations.

All of this combined makes the headline not quite what it appears to be.

Lanfear_Eshonai t1_j8qssvm wrote on February 16, 2023 at 7:42 AM

> It's less than 1% of his net worth. It's a tax write off.

If the money donated is actually used for charitable causes, does it matter?

> Instead of paying my ridiculously low relative share of taxes

What? $11 billion personal tax in 2021 not good enough?

> Since it's not transparent,

That can be a valid concern.

mredofcourse t1_j8r1fil wrote on February 16, 2023 at 9:43 AM

>[less than 1% of net worth and it's a tax write-off] If the money donated is actually used for charitable causes, does it matter?

Yes in two ways.

First there's the issue of this being newsworthy and the context of judging him as a person. The reality is a larger number of Americans donate a far greater percentage. His percentage is nothing special other than it's incredibly low considering how much he has not only as disposable income, but billions upon billions that could never be reasonably personally consumed. This compares to taking away 1% from some people and they're missing meals.

The second way it matters is that we have a society where we have elections and vote on issues. We the people have a government that collects taxes and we decide what we're going to spend that money on. We can collectively say how much we want to spend on education, the military, healthcare, infrastructure, etc...

But when we allow someone to take their share of taxes and spend it only on what they want to prioritize, then it's taking away from the democratic process. Again, it's even worse when the diversion of money ends up directly or indirectly benefiting him.

>What? $11 billion personal tax in 2021 not good enough?

Just looking at his wiki page as I don't want to spend too much time on this... he had a net worth of $27 billion at the start of 2020 and that ballooned to $300 billion in November 2021. So no, I don't think $11 billion was enough.

It's hard to find exactly what his tax rate is for a variety of reasons (including a likely deduction on that $11 billion), but a lot of sources are showing between 2013 and 2018 he paid 27 percent. Yes, that's way too low.