The richest person in the world and the most well-known person leading the cause against creating more people like him have many differing views on taxing the ultrawealthy.
But now, Elon Musk and Sen. Bernie Sanders, two men on opposite ends of the ideological spectrum, are using the same math to make opposite arguments for how much billionaires should be taxed, and how that money should be allocated.
In Musk’s view, collecting every cent billionaires rake in pales in comparison to federal debt, which is now hurling towards $39 trillion and counting.
“Even if you tax every billionaire in America at 100%, it barely makes a dent in the national debt,” Musk wrote on X in 2023. “In the end, the government will be forced to tax everyone to pay the debt.”
Sanders agrees—but he’s not looking to tax billionaires for all their worth and he’s not trying to eliminate the debt. Instead, he wants enough to give nearly three-quarters of the nation a nice check, offset cuts to federal health programs, and fund social services.
Would it help pay for the billions of debt that Diddlin’ Donnie is adding every day with his non-war?
Ok_Shoe_1094 on
Musk is a welfare queen. Sucking up my tax dollars
LivingIntelligent968 on
Here’s an idea. All of the corporations run by billionaires should have to repay any grants, loans or subsidies that they received in the last decade.
kia75 on
The purpose of raising the taxes on billionaires isn’t to fill the government coffers, people like Musk like to brag that if taxes were raised on them, rather then taking the money and being taxed on it, they’d keep it in their company, denying it from the government. That money could then go to raises for employees, R and D, or other stuff that would improve the economy instead of being hoarded like Dragon’s gold! If that happens and what Musk says is true, then the higher taxes ARE DOING THEIR JOB! The purpose is to improve the economy, not for anyone, either billionaires or the government to hoard all the money and keep it from circulating!
Jeremisio on
So I guess don’t tax them at all is his point
Wildpony03 on
Elon is using the same argument PregerU used more than a decade ago. They think taxes are when the government comes in and takes all your money. Its a very misleading and bad faith argument
I would prefer we go back to the corporate tax rate we had before the Reagan era tax cuts.
Much-Instruction-807 on
Just paying debt is shortsighted and shallow. The main purpose of taxing billions is to reduce their power.
anthematcurfew on
…so if the arguement is “don’t tax me because it barely does anything” then why am I also paying taxes that barely do anything?
asmusedtarmac on
doge “barely made a dent in the national debt” too, yet they still went ahead with it.
PixelatedFrogDotGif on
The funniest thing about this is that the hidden cost of taxing billionaires at 100% pays off incalculably towards social mobility, innovation, political influence, environmental protection, human rights, the ending of forever wars & the corruption of politics, the ending of genocides, increasing the likelihood of things like land back/ land stewardship practices taking hold, granting free universal healthcare, ending human trafficking, giving true reparation efforts for Black America(and the rest of the globe!), advancing women’s rights, trans rights, solar and wind power, ending enshittifocation and price gouging, stopping social division, ending climate change, and basically every other problem we have.
Liquidating billionaires in every sense of the word is the most ethical and impactful and effective thing we can do to start saving the planet and we don’t even need to think about the tax part in the equation.
H4NKSCORP10 on
Okay, well let’s do it anyway. Billionaires like Musk, Bezos, Zuckerberg, Ellison, etc. have shown that they’ll use their money to cripple democracy so they’re better off just having $100M instead.
How will they survive? Well they can get to pulling up their own bootstraps instead of having taxpayers subsidize their projects or citizens compromise on their own wellbeing so they can buy another megayacht.
Ferengi_Quark on
It’s not so much about national debt. It’s about limiting the power of money in politics, especially money coming from a single individual.
You never hear Musk talking about reducing the political power of those with extreme wealth, which is what is actually needed to sustain democratic systems.
Ill_Act_1855 on
These arguements are always super disingenuous because there’s not actually a point or a reason to completely eliminating national debt, just keeping it manageable, and there’s no reason you’d have to tax them everything at once when higher taxes applied over time will allow the rich to still recoup their losses from the taxes and continue to pay taxes indefinitely. The ultra rich accumulate wealth at an absurd rate, so even if you tax them a significant portion of their wealth each year they can still maintain or even grow net worth
Unxcused on
Remember when Elon was in charge of a group with the stated purpose of going after waste, fraud, and abuse and lowering the national debt, and now one year later the country is in even more debt, services have been crippled, and some giys with no life in their eyes transferred our social security data to their personal devices?
Mind_Killer on
Painting a tweet from Musk three years ago and Sanders’ proposed Make Billionaires Pay Their Fair Share Act as two sides of the same coin is both misleading and disingenuous.
Musk’s argument is hyperbolic and completely impractical. It’s also talking strictly about the national debt and where America is headed on this Republican spending spree.
Sanders’ argument keeps the billionaires as billionaires while helping use some of their acquired wealth to address the affordability crisis, which includes WAY more than $3,000 checks but also expands Medicare, saves cuts on the Affordable Care Act, pays public school teachers, builds affordable housing, and more.
This is a poorly written article that tries to play both sides as if they were on equal footing when they aren’t.
Skraelings on
Because i’m going to take advice from the guy trying to get to a trillion and who already got the largest ceo bonus in history. Yeah hes got no self interest at all in stopping any taxes at all, nope, no sir.
Fuck off elon, go be rich somewhere else and leave us alone.
dangubiti on
Wealth tax is best thought of as a way to prevent a bunch of insane freaks from controlling the government as opposed to reducing debt or paying for services.
Movinginplace25 on
Something is better than nothing
0utlaw-t0rn on
I guess it really depends on what you are talking about.
Taxing them for one year doesn’t impact the debt all that much. We have a lot of debt. But it will significantly alter the yearly deficit.
And depending on what you actually tax it may not net that much. Details here matter a lot. For example, most billionaires have their wealth in “stuff”, they aren’t making that much standard taxable income each year unlike most of us who have almost everything as standard taxable income. Someone who is worth $10 billion might have 90% of that tied up in stocks and assets that aren’t normally taxed.
But it makes a lot more sense to tax the wealthy. They have money to give and derive most of that wealth off of systems and infrastructure paid for by the government. Someone with $10b doesn’t need another $10,000 (you can keep scaling this number up a few orders of magnitude as well) and would probably never even notice it but that makes a massive difference for most Americans.
Morgannin09 on
I’m gonna say the rich guy who has something to lose if he pays taxes might be the one who is full of shit.
GooseCloaca on
Well Elon, let’s try it for forty years and see. That’s about how long it took everyone to see reganomics effects.
HallucinogenicFish on
> Musk says taxing every billionaire at 100% would barely make a dent in the national debt.
Let’s try it and see.
MalazMudkip on
“Let’s try two years at 80% and see what happens”
shadowlips on
using his logic: if billionaires barely make a dent, then the average taxpayer won’t make any difference to the national debt… so there should be no taxes at all for the average taxpayer. Genius!
Stereo_Jungle_Child on
The r/theydidthemathsub has already answered this question several times. Unfortunately, Elon is mostly correct.
RPrimate on
What if they were taxed at a reasonable rate for the last 3 or 4 decades how would that change the math. Taxing me isn’t making a difference so why am I being taxed? See how stupid that sounds?
francis2559 on
I would love to have $3000, but I would happily get rid of billionaires for free.
Yes we can do a lot of good with that money, but even taking their power away is a benefit just by itself.
joeleidner22 on
The rich will always tell us that taxing them is bad. They are liars and wealth hoarders.
Zanos-Ixshlae on
Musk is a moron and a liar. These are the least of his negative traits.
oily76 on
$3k in total, or annually? Annually would make a huge difference to the poorest.
BannedPomegranate on
Rich people will say anything to not have to pay
MiddleAgedSponger on
The bottom 30% of American citizens have a new worth of zero and can barely afford necessities. They are going to make less of a dent. The people with the most money are the people who are going to have to pay the debt.
Elon Musk complaining about paying taxes when 40% of Tesla revenue comes from goverment subsidies is laughable. Space X is goverment contracts.
SirGumbeaux on
Let’s tax them and find out.
git0ffmylawnm8 on
One of these two has a vested interest in not taxing billionaires. And then there’s Bernie.
Fuck this parasite all the way to Pluto
TheGOPisTheDeepState on
fElon, Nazi, and pedophile enabler who wanted to go to Epstein’s wildest parties on the island doesn’t want to pay taxes…go figure.
Beksense on
Why would anyone listen to advice a billionaire has about taxing billionaires?
UnguentSlather on
Make them pay their fair share, regardless of how that brainless and corrupt dipshit Musk wants to misrepresent it.
heapinhelpin1979 on
Just because it doesn’t make a large impact on the total debt, doesn’t mean you should not even try to tax a billionaire, bozo
KanyeWestsPoo on
As usual he misses the point. Wealth taxes are a tool for leveling the playing field. For stopping a few billionaires from having an outsized impact on our lives. It’s not just about raising money, it’s about creating a more equal society.
PleasantWay7 on
Just to be clear for everyone. The national debt is not something you pay back like a car loan. Republicans like to use this credit card analogy to confuse people into thinking we’re supposed to pay it back like regular finances.
The debt serves a whole different purpose for a country like the US, it helps us maintain our status as the world reserve currency which keeps commodities prices in dollars and allows us to issue treasuries to other countries all over the world. It is a very stabilizing force to the dollar and has greatly increased the wealth of Americans.
You can’t let it grow out of control and it did get pretty hot during the last two crisis by Republican Presidents, but you just need to keeps its growth in line with GDP growth. Which you could do by slashing a lot of unnecessary military spending.
Republicans want it to sound like a crisis so you think only they can fix it, then they use it as an excuse to make you feel pain so they can cut taxes for corpos and the rich. And you’ll notice, in all this pain it never goes down.
kittyonkeyboards on
I don’t care if the billionaire’s money gets burned in a pit.
The most important part of taxing billionaires is getting rid of their power.
Amenian on
Who we going to believe here? The richest man in the world who would suddenly have obscene numbers for his taxes? Or the guy that’s been fighting for the common man for decades? Tough one
Turdsley on
This is the guy that said he could trim a few trillion off our debt but instead increased that debt. He is smart.
44 Comments
The richest person in the world and the most well-known person leading the cause against creating more people like him have many differing views on taxing the ultrawealthy.
But now, Elon Musk and Sen. Bernie Sanders, two men on opposite ends of the ideological spectrum, are using the same math to make opposite arguments for how much billionaires should be taxed, and how that money should be allocated.
In Musk’s view, collecting every cent billionaires rake in pales in comparison to federal debt, which is now hurling towards $39 trillion and counting.
“Even if you tax every billionaire in America at 100%, it barely makes a dent in the national debt,” Musk wrote on X in 2023. “In the end, the government will be forced to tax everyone to pay the debt.”
Sanders agrees—but he’s not looking to tax billionaires for all their worth and he’s not trying to eliminate the debt. Instead, he wants enough to give nearly three-quarters of the nation a nice check, offset cuts to federal health programs, and fund social services.
Read more: [https://fortune.com/2026/03/17/elon-musk-billionaire-tax-national-debt-bernie-sanders-3000/](https://fortune.com/2026/03/17/elon-musk-billionaire-tax-national-debt-bernie-sanders-3000/)
Would it help pay for the billions of debt that Diddlin’ Donnie is adding every day with his non-war?
Musk is a welfare queen. Sucking up my tax dollars
Here’s an idea. All of the corporations run by billionaires should have to repay any grants, loans or subsidies that they received in the last decade.
The purpose of raising the taxes on billionaires isn’t to fill the government coffers, people like Musk like to brag that if taxes were raised on them, rather then taking the money and being taxed on it, they’d keep it in their company, denying it from the government. That money could then go to raises for employees, R and D, or other stuff that would improve the economy instead of being hoarded like Dragon’s gold! If that happens and what Musk says is true, then the higher taxes ARE DOING THEIR JOB! The purpose is to improve the economy, not for anyone, either billionaires or the government to hoard all the money and keep it from circulating!
So I guess don’t tax them at all is his point
Elon is using the same argument PregerU used more than a decade ago. They think taxes are when the government comes in and takes all your money. Its a very misleading and bad faith argument
I would prefer we go back to the corporate tax rate we had before the Reagan era tax cuts.
Just paying debt is shortsighted and shallow. The main purpose of taxing billions is to reduce their power.
…so if the arguement is “don’t tax me because it barely does anything” then why am I also paying taxes that barely do anything?
doge “barely made a dent in the national debt” too, yet they still went ahead with it.
The funniest thing about this is that the hidden cost of taxing billionaires at 100% pays off incalculably towards social mobility, innovation, political influence, environmental protection, human rights, the ending of forever wars & the corruption of politics, the ending of genocides, increasing the likelihood of things like land back/ land stewardship practices taking hold, granting free universal healthcare, ending human trafficking, giving true reparation efforts for Black America(and the rest of the globe!), advancing women’s rights, trans rights, solar and wind power, ending enshittifocation and price gouging, stopping social division, ending climate change, and basically every other problem we have.
Liquidating billionaires in every sense of the word is the most ethical and impactful and effective thing we can do to start saving the planet and we don’t even need to think about the tax part in the equation.
Okay, well let’s do it anyway. Billionaires like Musk, Bezos, Zuckerberg, Ellison, etc. have shown that they’ll use their money to cripple democracy so they’re better off just having $100M instead.
How will they survive? Well they can get to pulling up their own bootstraps instead of having taxpayers subsidize their projects or citizens compromise on their own wellbeing so they can buy another megayacht.
It’s not so much about national debt. It’s about limiting the power of money in politics, especially money coming from a single individual.
You never hear Musk talking about reducing the political power of those with extreme wealth, which is what is actually needed to sustain democratic systems.
These arguements are always super disingenuous because there’s not actually a point or a reason to completely eliminating national debt, just keeping it manageable, and there’s no reason you’d have to tax them everything at once when higher taxes applied over time will allow the rich to still recoup their losses from the taxes and continue to pay taxes indefinitely. The ultra rich accumulate wealth at an absurd rate, so even if you tax them a significant portion of their wealth each year they can still maintain or even grow net worth
Remember when Elon was in charge of a group with the stated purpose of going after waste, fraud, and abuse and lowering the national debt, and now one year later the country is in even more debt, services have been crippled, and some giys with no life in their eyes transferred our social security data to their personal devices?
Painting a tweet from Musk three years ago and Sanders’ proposed Make Billionaires Pay Their Fair Share Act as two sides of the same coin is both misleading and disingenuous.
Musk’s argument is hyperbolic and completely impractical. It’s also talking strictly about the national debt and where America is headed on this Republican spending spree.
Sanders’ argument keeps the billionaires as billionaires while helping use some of their acquired wealth to address the affordability crisis, which includes WAY more than $3,000 checks but also expands Medicare, saves cuts on the Affordable Care Act, pays public school teachers, builds affordable housing, and more.
This is a poorly written article that tries to play both sides as if they were on equal footing when they aren’t.
Because i’m going to take advice from the guy trying to get to a trillion and who already got the largest ceo bonus in history. Yeah hes got no self interest at all in stopping any taxes at all, nope, no sir.
Fuck off elon, go be rich somewhere else and leave us alone.
Wealth tax is best thought of as a way to prevent a bunch of insane freaks from controlling the government as opposed to reducing debt or paying for services.
Something is better than nothing
I guess it really depends on what you are talking about.
Taxing them for one year doesn’t impact the debt all that much. We have a lot of debt. But it will significantly alter the yearly deficit.
And depending on what you actually tax it may not net that much. Details here matter a lot. For example, most billionaires have their wealth in “stuff”, they aren’t making that much standard taxable income each year unlike most of us who have almost everything as standard taxable income. Someone who is worth $10 billion might have 90% of that tied up in stocks and assets that aren’t normally taxed.
But it makes a lot more sense to tax the wealthy. They have money to give and derive most of that wealth off of systems and infrastructure paid for by the government. Someone with $10b doesn’t need another $10,000 (you can keep scaling this number up a few orders of magnitude as well) and would probably never even notice it but that makes a massive difference for most Americans.
I’m gonna say the rich guy who has something to lose if he pays taxes might be the one who is full of shit.
Well Elon, let’s try it for forty years and see. That’s about how long it took everyone to see reganomics effects.
> Musk says taxing every billionaire at 100% would barely make a dent in the national debt.
Let’s try it and see.
“Let’s try two years at 80% and see what happens”
using his logic: if billionaires barely make a dent, then the average taxpayer won’t make any difference to the national debt… so there should be no taxes at all for the average taxpayer. Genius!
The r/theydidthemathsub has already answered this question several times. Unfortunately, Elon is mostly correct.
What if they were taxed at a reasonable rate for the last 3 or 4 decades how would that change the math. Taxing me isn’t making a difference so why am I being taxed? See how stupid that sounds?
I would love to have $3000, but I would happily get rid of billionaires for free.
Yes we can do a lot of good with that money, but even taking their power away is a benefit just by itself.
The rich will always tell us that taxing them is bad. They are liars and wealth hoarders.
Musk is a moron and a liar. These are the least of his negative traits.
$3k in total, or annually? Annually would make a huge difference to the poorest.
Rich people will say anything to not have to pay
The bottom 30% of American citizens have a new worth of zero and can barely afford necessities. They are going to make less of a dent. The people with the most money are the people who are going to have to pay the debt.
Elon Musk complaining about paying taxes when 40% of Tesla revenue comes from goverment subsidies is laughable. Space X is goverment contracts.
Let’s tax them and find out.
One of these two has a vested interest in not taxing billionaires. And then there’s Bernie.
Fuck this parasite all the way to Pluto
fElon, Nazi, and pedophile enabler who wanted to go to Epstein’s wildest parties on the island doesn’t want to pay taxes…go figure.
Why would anyone listen to advice a billionaire has about taxing billionaires?
Make them pay their fair share, regardless of how that brainless and corrupt dipshit Musk wants to misrepresent it.
Just because it doesn’t make a large impact on the total debt, doesn’t mean you should not even try to tax a billionaire, bozo
As usual he misses the point. Wealth taxes are a tool for leveling the playing field. For stopping a few billionaires from having an outsized impact on our lives. It’s not just about raising money, it’s about creating a more equal society.
Just to be clear for everyone. The national debt is not something you pay back like a car loan. Republicans like to use this credit card analogy to confuse people into thinking we’re supposed to pay it back like regular finances.
The debt serves a whole different purpose for a country like the US, it helps us maintain our status as the world reserve currency which keeps commodities prices in dollars and allows us to issue treasuries to other countries all over the world. It is a very stabilizing force to the dollar and has greatly increased the wealth of Americans.
You can’t let it grow out of control and it did get pretty hot during the last two crisis by Republican Presidents, but you just need to keeps its growth in line with GDP growth. Which you could do by slashing a lot of unnecessary military spending.
Republicans want it to sound like a crisis so you think only they can fix it, then they use it as an excuse to make you feel pain so they can cut taxes for corpos and the rich. And you’ll notice, in all this pain it never goes down.
I don’t care if the billionaire’s money gets burned in a pit.
The most important part of taxing billionaires is getting rid of their power.
Who we going to believe here? The richest man in the world who would suddenly have obscene numbers for his taxes? Or the guy that’s been fighting for the common man for decades? Tough one
This is the guy that said he could trim a few trillion off our debt but instead increased that debt. He is smart.