Twitter users vote 'yes' to Elon Musk's proposal to sell 10% stake in Tesla to pay tax

Elon Musk should sell about 10% of his stock in Tesla, according to nearly 58% of people who voted on his Twitter poll asking users whether he should offload the stake. More than 3.5 million Twitter users voted in the poll, launched by Musk on Saturday, with a majority voting in favour of the share sale. Musk had promised to abide by the result. Now, the Twitter poll could see him dispose of nearly $21 billion of stock in the electric carmaker.

57.9% of people said that the Tesla CEO should sell the shares, to which Musk said: "I was prepared to accept either outcome,” according to SkyNews. 

Over the weekend, Musk informed that he took no salary or bonuses from any of his companies, meaning he has no earnings on which to pay income tax. However, the Tesla and SpaceX CEO, according to BBC, has made billions of dollars through a compensation package, which gives him the power to exercise large amounts of stock options when his firm meets performance targets and its shares hit certain prices. “Much is made lately of unrealised gains being a means of tax avoidance, so I propose selling 10% of my Tesla stock,” the Tesla Chief Executive said on Twitter, adding, “I will abide by the results of this poll, whichever way it goes.” 

‘Billionaires Income Tax’ proposal 

It is to mention that Musk is currently the wealthiest person in the world. His recent Twitter poll came in response to US President Joe Biden’s recently proposed Democratic plan to levy the taxes on the top billionaires including Musk, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and 700 others. The proposal would affect people who either have an income of over $100 million for at least three years in a row or have assets worth over $1 billion. 

The domestic policy seeks to implement "billionaire tax”, an estimated 23.8% tax rate on the long-term capital gains on tradable assets for the big American tech giants. For scenarios that include non-tradeable assets, like real estate, once taxpayers sell their assets, they could pay both regular capital gains taxes and an additional charge. Meanwhile, Musk has previously also slammed the policy and claimed that it would slowly start targeting other taxpayers later on. 

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