Elon Musk, fresh off advising Amazon’s Jeff Bezos to spend “less time in the hot tub,” said over the weekend that he will be paying more than $11 billion in taxes this year.
The Tesla CEO’s announcement comes after the widely publicized selling off of roughly $14 billion in company stock, which itself was preceded by a viral Twitter poll in which he asked followers about selling 10 percent of his holdings.
When first sharing the poll in November, Musk connected its existence to criticism surrounding unrealized gains “being a means of tax avoidance.”
As for that $11 billion tax figure, CNBC reported Monday that it’s not far off from what the outlet recently estimated, pointing to its previous assessment that Musk could be positioned to pay taxes totaling $12 billion. Amid criticism surrounding his being named Time’s Person of the Year last week, including from Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren, Musk pushed back by claiming that he will pay “more taxes than any American in history” for 2021.
Several outlets, includingForbes, later took a look at that claim and determined that it could indeed prove to be accurate. According to that same publication, notably, Musk’s current net worth (at the time of this writing) is around $237 billion.
In June, Musk was among those highlighted in a ProPublica report focused on several wealthy public figures’ tax bills. Musk later called the report “very misleading.”
