Elon Musk, a man reportedly worth more than $300 billion dollars—almost all of which was gained during the pandemic—has been named Time magazine’s “Person of the Year.” Sen. Elizabeth Warren responded to the announcement by writing, “Let’s change the rigged tax code so The Person of the Year will actually pay taxes and stop freeloading off everyone else.”
For at least the last six years (as Musk became one of the two richest people in the world) he has paid somewhere around 3.27% in true taxes. That’s about .00327 cents on every one of his billions of dollars. Since 2018 (as his wealth has skyrocketed) Musk has probably not paid anything at all in income tax. In October, Musk’s Tesla was ordered to pay out nearly $137 million to a Black employee who sued the company for cartoonishly racial discrimination. Musk’s proclivity to tweet out unremarkable and predictable thoughts from time to time has led to embarrassing public relations issues—like Tesla being found guilty of union-busting by the National Labor Relations Board.
And while most people with sociopathic levels of wealth and power will at least donate some of their money (even organized crime bosses hand out turkeys at Thanksgiving, after all) Elon Musk's charitable donations have been paltry, if not nonexistent.
According to the Boston Globe, the TIME article defends its choice of Musk, writing: “Few individuals have had more influence than Musk on life on Earth, and potentially life off Earth, too. He sees his mission as solving the globe’s most intractable challenges, along the way disrupting multiple industries.” The problem is that Musk has had little practical influence on most people on Earth, and hasn't really solved any of the globe's challenges or disrupted anything (outside the SEC, that is).
Musk made some money from a software company he created, got richer from early digital money transferring, and then got a big payout when he was pushed out of PayPal. At that point he took a gamble by investing in Tesla, Inc (which was founded by two other guys). Musk didn't come up with any original or innovative ideas-- he simply showed up with lots of money. The “disruption” was having the capital and willingness to invest in a cleaner kind of car. He was later sued by the SEC for inappropriate tweeting and has been responsible for misleading public comments about COVID.
Musk recently told the Wall Street Journal that he wanted to get rid of the electric vehicle subsidies that created his astronomical wealth in the first place. This is a guy whose wealth was funded (in no small part) by literal billions of dollars in government subsidies. Like any true “libertarian,” Musk is a self-absorbed hypocrite who only believes in a government that works for Elon Musk, and Elon Musk alone.
The kind of hypocrisy is to be expected from a privileged jerk engaged in a dick-measuring space race against Jeff Bezos. Musk, like all billionaires, is proof of how much of a failure our current economic and government system is for the overwhelming majority of human beings.
Unsurprisingly, Time magazine's Twitter announcement of Musk as Person of the Year was utterly ratioed. A small example:
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