According to analysts at Morgan Stanley, Elon Musk, the world’s richest person, may become the world’s first trillionaire.
While Musk has made most of his fortune from the electric car company Tesla, there is speculation that much more is possible from his space exploration business SpaceX. Tesla is worth an estimated $850 billion, while SpaceX was valued at $100 billion, making it the second biggest privately owned company behind the internet company ByteDance. Musk owns about 48% of SpaceX. Bloomberg estimates Musk to be worth $241 billion in paper fortune, about $42 billion more than Jeff Bezos.
On Monday alone, Musk gained $36.2 billion, according to MarketWatch. This one day gain surpassed that of gross domestic products for entire countries, including Estonia, Latvia and Bolivia.
But Musk seems reluctant to embrace the proposal of a billionaire tax by the Democratic legislators as a way to pay for a reconciliation package. The tax is proposed to wage a levy on billionaires’ unrealized capital gains.
Musk responded to a tweet that contained a hypothetical template letter to a congressman, seeking opposition to the tax proposal.
The letter began: “I expect you to oppose the Wyden proposal to tax unrealized capital gains.”
“I anticipate that any new unrealized capital gains taxes will slowly make their way down to middle class retirement investments over the next several years. It will start with billionaires, then eventually millionaires, then the modest investments will get hit possibly within a decade,” the letter adds.
The proposed tax, which is known as “mark-to-market,” would likely apply to roughly 700 taxpayers who have more than $1 billion in assets or $100 million in income for three consecutive years.
From The Hill, The Guardian, and Thrillist