‘Keep forgetting you’re still alive’: Elon Musk takes potshots at Bernie Sanders, offers to sell more stocks

Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk got into a spat with Bernie Sanders, independent senator from US’ Vermont,  after the latter demanded that the extremely wealthy should pay their “fair share” of taxes. Musk retorted and said, “I keep forgetting that you’re still alive.” Musk, who has already sold around $7 billion worth of Tesla shares this week, further said, “Want me to sell more stock, Bernie? Just say the word…”

Earlier this week, he noted while Elon Musk is some $293 billion richer since the pandemic and around half of Americans don’t earn enough to afford to rent a single apartment and continue to live paycheck to paycheck. He further noted this is “what a rigged economy is all about.”

After the spat between Sanders and Musk gained momentum on social media, American Tennis player Martina Navratilova tweeted this is the exact reason she will never buy a Tesla share.

The Twitter spat between Musk and Sanders comes amid US’ efforts to hike taxes for the extremely wealthy. US Senate Democrats have put a proposal to tax billionaires’ stocks and other tradable assets to help President Biden’s social spending agenda and close a loophole that allowed them to defer capital gains taxes immediately.

This, however, is not the first time that Musk has talked about offloading his shares in Tesla. Elon Musk had also tweeted that he would sell 10 per cent of his shares if Twitter users approved of it. The 10 per cent shares would amount to ~17 million shares at the time of his tweet. “Much is made lately of unrealized gains being a means of tax avoidance, so I propose selling 10 per cent of my Tesla stock,” he tweeted.

(With Reuters inputs)

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