A jury has found Elon Musk liable for misleading investors by deliberately driving down Twitter’s stock price in the tumultuous months leading up to his 2022 acquisition of the social media company for $44 billion. But it absolved him of some fraud allegations, finding that he did not “scheme” to mislead investors.
This scheme is called “buy, borrow, die.” It’s legal. The stocks are typically not sold off, so capital gains taxes are avoided. Loans and debt are not taxable. It’s effectively profit with relatively low risk. The point is that the level of entry is extremely high. One must already have large amounts of money to qualify for these kinds of loans.
The problem, of course, is that if you start taxing debt, like people taking out loans, it’s not just going to be millionaires, as you called them “parasites,” paying those taxes. It will be everybody taking out a loan, including the poor and the middle class.
The proposed solution is to tax people based on net worth. If you’re worth above a certain amount, then you get taxed at a very high percentage.
With that being said, if that were the case and Elon Musk were taxed like this, he would only pay around $12–$13 billion out of the roughly $800 billion he already has. In essence, it would still be pocket change to him.
At this point, wealthy people not paying taxes has become a kind of game, who can pay the least.