It’s a bit like the meme of The Simpsons monkey knife-fight, as we all gather round to watch two elites who’ve amassed fortunes of other peoples’ money, shouting at each other Twitter. My money’s on the monkey with the rockets.
The world’s richest man, electric car pioneer Elon Musk, has lampooned powerful Democrat Senator Elizabeth Warren as a “Karen” after she called him a freeloader for paying little tax, ratcheting up the Tesla billionaire’s running feud with the Democrats.
The funny thing is that they’re both right: Musk is a freeloader whose wealth is almost solely dependent on government subsidies and regulations, and Warren is a shrewish Karen and a fraud (who also happens to have amassed her, paltry compared to Musk perhaps, but still considerable wealth by leeching off other people).
The main difference between the two of them is that one builds things, useful things, and the other has never built a damned thing, let alone of any use, in her life.
“Let’s change the rigged tax code so The Person of the Year will actually pay taxes and stop freeloading off everyone else,” Senator Warren tweeted on Tuesday, referring to Mr Musk, who was named Time magazine’s person of the year earlier in the week for his contributions to business and space exploration.
Mr Musk, who faces a multibillion dollar capital gains tax bill this year, said he would pay more tax in 2021 than “any American in history”, which the senator would know “if [she] opened [her] eyes for 2 seconds”.
Here’s the thing, though: Musk’s signature enterprise, Tesla, would have gone broke long ago were it not for massive government support. So, it’s a bit rich for him to rail against government regulation.
“Rules and regulations are immortal,” Musk said. “They don’t die. The vast majority of rules and regulations live forever … there’s not really an effective garbage collection system for removing rules and regulations, so this hardens the arteries of civilisation,” he added.
Mr Musk, an outspoken critic of the Biden administration’s response to Covid-19, who last year said Sweden was “right” to avoid lockdowns, announced he would move Tesla’s headquarters from California to Texas in September, citing restrictive tax and pandemic rules.
Also chief executive of Tesla, which controls around two-third of the global electric car markets, Mr Musk also called President Biden a union-controlled “sock puppet” in October.
There’s more than a bit of self-interest at play, too. For instance, the Build Back Better bill would exclude Tesla’s non-union workforce from massive new subsidies for electric cars. For Warren’s part, her “wealth tax” conveniently skips over her own multi-million-dollar wealth. Not unlike fellow champagne socialist Bernie Sanders, who stopped attacking “millionaires” and changed tack to “billionaires”, purely coincidentally just after he became a millionaire (despite never having done a day’s work outside government in his life).
Warren is also notorious for having long peddled the fiction that she is “Native American”, allowing her to scarf up grants and privileged jobs.
Senator Warren has advocated for an annual wealth tax of 4 per cent on wealth in excess of $1bn.
“Don’t spend it all at once … oh wait you did already,” Mr Musk also tweeted at the senator, referring to the Congressional Budget Office’s estimate that the bill would add $158bn to the federal deficit over the next decade.
To repeat, while Musk uses his taxpayer-funded money to actually build stuff, and at least has some skin in the game, Warren splurges hundreds of billions on useless boondoggles for which she’ll never, ever be held accountable.
Besides, Daddy Elon is at least funny.
Mr Musk pledged to sell 10 per cent of his Tesla holding after conducting a poll of his Twitter followers, which could trigger tax obligations up to US $15bn.
“Please don’t call the manager on me, Senator Karen,” Mr Musk went on, referring to a name that is sometimes used to criticise entitled middle aged women since the coronavirus pandemic began.
“You remind me of when I was a kid and my friend’s angry mom would just randomly yell at everyone for no reason,” he added.
The Australian
Please share this article so that others can discover The BFD