The famous Elon Musk launched a poll on Twitter to let his followers decide whether or not to sell 10% of his Tesla shares, the equivalent of $20 billion, to pay taxes. Among the comments, some suggest to sell only to buy Bitcoin.
Elon Musk, Tesla shares and “unrealized gains”.
The CEO of Tesla published his poll to his 62.8 million followers with the following tweets:
Much is made lately of unrealized gains being a means of tax avoidance, so I propose selling 10% of my Tesla stock.
Do you support this?
— Lorde Edge (@elonmusk) November 6, 2021
“Much is made lately of unrealized gains being a means of tax avoidance, so I propose selling 10% of my Tesla stock. Do you support this?”.
Note, I do not take a cash salary or bonus from anywhere. I only have stock, thus the only way for me to pay taxes personally is to sell stock.
— Lorde Edge (@elonmusk) November 6, 2021
“I will abide by the results of this poll, whichever way it goes”
“Note, I do not take a cash salary or bonus from anywhere. I only have stock, thus the only way for me to pay taxes personally is to sell stock”.
Highly appreciated (over 130,000 likes), Musk’s tweet-poll was voted on, at the time of writing, already by more than 3.5 million of his followers with a 57.9% predominance of “Yes”.
Musk’s question about “unrealized gains” refers to the latest US Infrastructure Bill for billionaires, in which there was much discussion about unrealized gains.
Unrealized gains are profits related to the increase in value of shares that, as long as they are not sold and generate cash, are not subject to US taxation.
This is why the richest man in the world points out that he is rich because he owns about 20% of Tesla shares, from which he receives no salary or bonus and on which he does not pay taxes.
Elon Musk and the comments on his survey
The first to respond to the question of “unrealized gains”, putting himself in Musk’s shoes, is crypto influencer Anthony Pompliano who, ironically, confirms his stance:
If you sell $20B+ of stock, the government will be able to fund themselves for a few minutes with the tax payment you’ll make.
They’ll celebrate like you balanced the budget though
— Pomp
(@APompliano) November 6, 2021
“If you sell $20B+ of stock, the government will be able to fund themselves for a few minutes with the tax payment you’ll make. They’ll celebrate like you balanced the budget though”.
Michael Saylor, CEO of MicroStrategy instead suggested Bitcoin as a diversification asset:
If the goal is diversification, an alternate strategy to consider is converting the $TSLA balance sheet to a #Bitcoin Standard and purchasing $25 billion in $BTC. That would deliver diversification, inflation protection, & more upside for all investors in a tax efficient manner.
— Michael Saylor
(@saylor) November 6, 2021
“If the goal is diversification, an alternate strategy to consider is converting the $TSLA balance sheet to a #Bitcoin Standard and purchasing $25 billion in $BTC. That would deliver diversification, inflation protection, & more upside for all investors in a tax efficient manner”.
Even former Tesla employee Michael Rihani, who now works as a crypto product lead at Jack Dorsey’s Square Inc. tweeted at his old boss:
“Yes, sell to receive $10B+ USD and buy bitcoin with it. You’ll turn that $10B+ into $100B+ and can use the proceeds to (1) increase the odds of fulfilling the Tesla and SpaceX missions and (2) helping even more people and countries”.
Not just Bitcoin: Dogecoin also pops up among the comments
Besides Bitcoin as a viable alternative, his followers also included comments of support for Dogecoin, Musk’s favourite crypto-meme.
Indeed, someone is reported to have asked the Tesla billionaire to put money into DOGE, dubbed the “people’s cryptocurrency”.
In this regard, Musk had recently confirmed that he personally owns only three cryptocurrencies: Bitcoin, Ethereum and Dogecoin, denying his interest in the “Dogecoin Killer”, Shiba Inu (SHIB).
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