New Delhi: Electric vehicle (EV) maker Tesla's boss Elon Musk has announced that he will pay a hefty bill of more than $11 billion in taxes this year. The announcement, made by Musk on Twitter might be right as the world’s richest person likely owes a hefty tax bill of at least $8.3 billion for this year, based on his stock sales of nearly $13 billion through December 13, the media has reported.
The Tesla CEO is the world's richest person and his EV maker is worth around $1 trillion. Democratic US Senator Elizabeth Warren had posted on Twitter to write that the Tesla boss should pay taxes and stop "freeloading off everyone else" after Time magazine named him its "person of the year" to which Musk replied that "will pay more taxes than any American in history this year", according to news agency Reuters.
Musk paid a total of $455 million in federal income taxes between 2014 and 2018, while his wealth grew by $13.8 billion; Musk paid no federal income taxes at all in 2018. (He also didn’t sell any shares of Tesla that year.), said a Forbes report quoting ProPublica investigation. The Tesla boss has also sold a half-dozen California mansions this year that may have produced income subject to taxation.
Earlier last week, the Tesla and SpaceX CEO had sold another 934,091 shares of the electric vehicle maker worth $906.5 million, according to US securities filings.
Musk, who is the wealthiest person in the world and who was just named Time Magazine’s 2021 Person of the Year, still has millions of stock options that he needs to exercise by August 2022. He revealed at the 2021 Code Conference on September 28 that he would likely sell a large chunk of stock in the fourth quarter.