The hottest poll in Twitter history has results: the “wild” tweet is about to blow away more than $ 20 billion of Elon Musk’s fortune

Yesterday, Elon Musk created the largest survey in Twitter history when he asked his more than 62 million followers if he should sell 10% of his Tesla shares to pay income tax. .

Now, this vote has a result – 57.9% of the more than 3 million people who took part in the vote chose “Yes” and the remaining 42.1% chose “No” – meaning the majority of respondents Observers agree that the richest person on the planet should do it to pay taxes.

And like Mr. Musk’s earlier promise – to ” follow the outcome of the vote no matter what “. If Mr. Musk stays true to his word, yesterday’s survey tweet is about to cost him nearly 20 million Tesla shares – 10% of the roughly 200 million Tesla shares he holds – equivalent. equivalent to $22 billion.

The cause of this “ridiculous” tweet is the US government’s new tax bill on billionaires. Under this measure, taxes would be charged on the increased portion of the property even if the person did not sell the property to realize a profit. This bill is expected to fill a loophole in the old laws when billionaires – especially those who have made their fortunes through stocks like Elon Musk – can avoid paying taxes when using stocks as collateral for investors. loans, instead of selling them for money.

Saturday’s tweet isn’t the first time Musk has mentioned the idea of ​​selling Tesla stock. Musk previously told reporter Kara Swisher at the Code Conference in September that he was thinking of selling a portion of Tesla stock options before they expire.

And like the people the new US income tax bill is targeting, while Musk doesn’t get a salary from Tesla, he does get bonus stock options. When cash is needed, instead of selling stocks to get money, Elon Musk often mortgages the shares he has for loans. Thus, he has money to use while still not paying personal income tax.

Therefore, Mr. Musk is one of the fiercest critics of this bill. But for tens of billions of dollars of his fortune to be decided by the majority of users on Twitter, there is only this eccentric billionaire.

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