Elon Musk only takes big leaps. It’s a reasonable bet that there’s no laddered, tax-free, municipal bond aspect to his investment portfolio. Musk is an enemy of government waste, not a subsidizer of it.
As he recently posted on X, when all is said and done he’ll account for $500 billion in federal taxes paid. Which is just so sad. Think about it.
Musk isn’t a high-living type, which means he mostly puts his untaxed wealth to work. Better yet, he takes impossible risks with his wealth not so he has more to spend, but so that he can take even bigger risks.
It’s worth thinking about this in relation to the taxes Musk expects to pay. What if he were taxed substantially less, as in what if the American electorate could grasp that a tax on Elon Musk is a tax on every American exactly because it provides the political class with hundreds of billions worth of central planning power.
Of course, much more important is that hundreds of billions worth of taxes paid by Musk represent hundreds of billions worth of intrepid, frequently impossible, information creating leaps not taken by Musk. Which would you prefer: Elon Musk matching his myriad ideas meant to create a better future with capital, or people like Donald Trump, Gavin Newsom, Chuck Schumer, Mike Johnson, and Hasan Jeffries allocating Musk’s wealth in politicized fashion? Hopefully the question answers itself. And no, it’s not political.
It’s just a comment that politicians blithely consume precious wealth on notions that epitomize stasis, or much worse (central planning’s track record is pretty poor), while people like Musk are feverishly trying to invent the future. They’re trying to get us in cars that do our driving for us, no doubt private planes eventually, robots that work and think for us, spaceships that make us a multi-planetary species, brain inserts that will someday make it possible for the paralyzed to walk, and all sorts of other things never imagined.
Never imagined is italicized to make a bigger point. Politicians spend money wastefully on the knowns, while Musk’s aim is to spend every dollar in front of him on unknowns. It’s worth contemplating the never imagined part while similarly contemplating what a massive share of Musk’s wealth that the federal government will help itself to over the decades and beyond.
Precisely because Musk isn’t a muni guy, all the wealth he creates will amount to a huge liquidity event for government. The federal government penalizes big, seemingly impossible economic leaps of the kind tried by Musk, but municipal income streams are tax free on the state and federal level. Imagine that.
Which is why the horrid taxes Musk will pay should worry us all, regardless of political persuasion. Think about the size of the museum that would be required to house all the advances that were never tried, and subsequently never saw the light of day because the federal government arrogated too much of the wealth created by Musk to itself.
To which some on the right will say (think the well-intentioned scholars at the various major think tanks) that Musk’s taxes can’t be reduced on account of the national debt. The only answer to such absurd reasoning (that is also conventional wisdom among the deep in thought) is that they all should go back to school, or better yet, they shouldn't.
If they can’t see that the debt is an effect of the excessive taxation of Musk, then they shouldn’t comment on it. It’s evident they haven’t a faint clue why we have it.
