Tesla CEO Elon Musk has said that he’ll pay more than $11 billion in taxes this year, which could constitute a record payment of the US Internal Revenue Services.
“For those wondering, I will pay over $11 billion in taxes this year,” Musk said in a tweet on Sunday.
Earlier this week, Democratic US Senator Elizabeth Warren took to Twitter to say that Musk should pay taxes and stop “freeloading off everyone else” after Time magazine named him its “person of the year”.
In response, Musk had said that he “will pay more taxes than any American in history this year”.
Musk is the world’s richest person and his company Tesla is worth about $1 trillion. Over the last few weeks, Musk has sold nearly $14 billion worth of Tesla shares.
Musk currently has a net worth of approximately $1 trillion.
A report by ProPublica in June revealed that Elon Musk, along with more of America’s top billionaires, paid very little income tax in recent years.
The ProPublica report alleged that Musk paid less than $70,000 in federal income tax in 2015 and 2017, and nothing at all in 2018.
He did seem to have paid his due in 2016 when he exercised more than $1 billion in stock options.
But his overall “true tax rate” for the five-year period between 2014 and 2018, calculated as the amount of tax paid divided by the increase in net worth, is only 3.27 percent, much lower than an average American household.
