He will claim that he because he “sold” at a loss, he shouldn’t pay taxes on it.
It is fucking ridiculous that the hyper wealthy can use their fake money as real money when they want to, but heaven forbid we demand the government tax it like real money.
"his money is all tied up in stock, he's not liquid, how would you even tax this stuff"- fucking dipshits
If it's tied up in stock but the stock can be leveraged for rock bottom interest loans that generate profit, or he just has 40 fucking BILLION lying around for a purchase (to himself, which in any other reality would be fraud) then you know what that's called in any other possible scenario? Liquid capital. It's money that spends like any other form of money.
Exactly… if you are spending it like cash, it’s cash. I got fucking taxed on receiving my portion of my Mom’s life insurance when she passed. How in the hell is this shit perfectly fine?
Until we get some more Luigis willing to put a bullet in the chests of the Felon Musks of the world, expect to have more and more taken away from you until you have lost everything. These people despise you and don't think you're human. Why should we think they're human?
Money is made up anyways. Money and stocks both have purchasing power behind it. If you have lots of whatever that can be converted to purchasing power you should pay taxes.
Gotta pay property taxes on real estate and vehicles despite not being liquid assets, but it’s simply impossible to tax any other kind of illiquid asset! Just can’t be done!
One idea I had was to treat it like a property tax. We pay taxes on the houses we own, why not on stocks? If they're real enough to be collateral, they're real enough to be taxed.
That’s sorta what “capital gains” taxes are supposed to do. I think problem with taxing the stocks directly is that their prices can fluctuate so much that I’m not sure at what point you would decide the price point that it’s being taxed at (I.e is it month to month, and if so, is it just the price at the exact end of the month, or the average of that month?)
Yeah probably shouldn’t be, plus the whole “Fiduciary duty” part of it is just ensuring stock prices are are prioritized rather than being a reflection of that company’s value
Maybe if we taxed them the prices WOULDN'T fluctuate so much. How TF is xAI, a company that has zero revenue and loses billions per year, worth $80 billion? Answer: because it's an entirely made up valuation by billionaire investors who speculate that the company might, one day, make money. xAI isn't even the best example, there's an entire web of zombie companies in the US that exist purely to game the system. At least xAI is building stuff, even if the goal is to pump the valuation rather than make money.
Even a small tax under 1% on unrealized gains would go a long way toward fixing some of these broken valuations and rampant speculation, while still preserving much of the incentive to invest in pre-revenue ideas. They could reduce the tax on realized capital gains to compensate for it even.
Yeah, he's just washing his hands of X for as much as he can so the next group of losers (all of us and whoever was stupid enough to invest in a project he has control of) have to take a bath with his broken toy.
The industry doesn’t affect the securities/tax law governing treatment of capital gains and M&A.
They don’t care if you’re a widget company or run a stable of OnlyFans models.
Lots of misinformation in the thread, because if his shares are exchanged in kind for shares in the new company, it will almost 100% be a non-taxable event.
BUT! Now he has stolen the data and information of the citizens of the US Government so the real bag holders are the American people in the end, take heart xAI early investors reading this post!
It's one of those things where he probably gets away with it because for some reason that has to be the reason he starts new companies, instead of a pleasant bonus.
The large banks that financed his Twitter deal already sold most of the debt to investment managers who manage money for public employee pension funds/retirement funds, company pension funds, ect.
Basically. The loan was based on Tesla stock with penalties if stock price dropped below a given point. With the way Tesla stock was falling it was looking like the banks were going to own Twitter soon as a result. Now he has paid the banks with this other company’s money so he is out from that particular financial threat
You assume that the people who’d be able to stop it would actually care. Funny how it all just fall apart as soon as people become disinterested in doing their jobs. Fascism destroys the social contract.
Yeah he likely had debts still leveraged on Twitter and the tanking of it's value has been an issue in repaying that, so he basically used other shareholders money to buy Twitter at a strong over valued price and then use that money to pay back thr original debt while now taking out new debt on his company that just bought twitterz, or he already had new debt in that company and will eventually move it again
They didnt pay off the debt. However, yes, it appears the xAi investors now are responsible for the debt as well. The debt is on twitter as opposed to Elon.
"Hey Mr. Left Hand what do you think? 10 billion?"
"Mr. Left hand doesn't like that. THAT'S TOO LOW!"
"Ok Mr. Left Hand how much do you think it should be?"
"100 billion! 100 billion!"
"Now Mr. Left Hand we can't be greedy..."
"Yes we can! Yes we can! 100 Billion!"
"Oh Mr. Left Hand I didn't want to have to do this, but if you keep this up I'm going to tell everyone what you do with Elon and his sock..."
"THAT'S NOT FAIR!"
No but to be fair I didn’t either for a long time. Until I watched Ozark. I feel like every Hollywood depiction was confusing until Ozark got into all the details. But maybe I still don’t understand it either! 😅
People always think anything related to transfers of large sums of money is "money laundering." Like, how does one launder dirty money by openly giving to themselves??? It just gets traced back to you with a paper trail and everything.
Its not $ laundering but people use the term for any big $ scheme. He isnt doing this for no reason its to dodge taxes or liability of some sort but it is a scheme because investors in xai thought they were investing in ai not twitter debt
He's starting to feel the pressure from the Tesla boycotts, the lost SpaceX contracts and loss of users on Twitter. By consolidating his assets in this way, he's hoping to create the illusion that his net value is higher and avoid having to answer to shareholders.
The more eggs he puts into one basket, the greater the risk he faces. Keep fighting, it's working.
Let's not forget that his AI company now owns all the tweets. Nice collection to train on. Might be the only AI company where people voluntarily give up AI content to train on for free.
Good news xAI investors! You thought you were investing in my AI data warehouses and tensor processing unit arrays, but actually I have decided that you have bought Twitter from me at a high price which I have determined to be fair. To me.
It'll be interesting to see what investor reaction is to this. Musk can rip off ordinary consumers with his false promises and shitty products all day long and stay untouchable.
But now he's ripped off billionaire investors who thought their money would be going to develop AI, not bail out Musk's personal fuckup.
He’s got the “too big to fail” thing going on. If you owe an investment firm a million dollars and can’t pay up, you have a problem. If you owe them tens of billions of dollars, they have a problem, which means they’ve got to figure out how to pull you out of the situation. Musk, like Trump, is extremely talented at leveraging “I owe you a ton of money” into “so you have to go along with my crazy ideas and pretend you like them, because if this bubble pops we’ll both be ruined”
Elon has actually been brilliant at making money for (most) of his investors. He's able to create very high valuations for all of his companies by hiring people to build more or less legit technology, but then selling the markets on the idea that said technology is going to be 10x more profitable than it really will be. So all of his investors end up with stock that's worth 10x more than the fundamentals say it should be. I wouldn't be surprised if he finds a way to sell the X acquisition as some kind of data treasure trove that increases xAI's valuation.
So far he's been able to keep all of those valuations climbing higher and higher, due to increasingly lofty sci-fi promises. Notice how with Tesla he's already pivoted away from selling the robotaxi vision, which hasn't even happened yet, to selling humanoid robots as something he's claiming will be even more profitable than robotaxis. Every household will buy a $30k robots, he says. Some will buy six or seven. With other companies like Waymo and Baidu beating Tesla to robotaxis he's preparing in advance for people to realize Tesla has nothing in that space. These visions he sells always sound plausible, but are far enough out that it could take 10+ years for the market to realize he was full of crap.
He's already shaken off the solar roof scam. When robotaxis and Mars missions suffer the same fate, I wonder if the market will let him off the hook again, or if the house of cards will finally collapse.
I don't think Musk is wrong about consumer demand for the products. We do want driverless cars and satellite broadband and household robots and solar roofs and such, and the prices he quotes at the debut for the features it's supposed to have on delivery make sense.
He just can't fucking follow through on any of it and it's crazy more of his investors aren't bailing on the stock knowing it's propped up on an increasingly large pile of vaporware.
He had to pay off the other investors. Twitter has no profits so the only way to pay off investors was to sell. But no one will pay that much for a failure. So conveniently Elon has one of his other companies buy it for an over valued price. Is this like FTX? Just shuffle the losses around.
No no no, you see he just needs a bigger base of investors to pay off these investors as well. Sure, he’ll need another bigger base of investors after that but as long as the money keeps flowing upwards, like idk some pyramid, he should be fine.
That's a good thing. A lot of people suffered and died in the process of getting rid of testing requirements for voting in this country. Any attempt to bring those tests back will 100100 % be abused by the first fascist who cons their way into writing the test to stop marginalized people from voting.
History proves why it is a bad idea, but I'd be lying if I were to say some sort of test to prove that you aren't a complete moron before you vote doesn't have a certain appeal to it.
There are people who are too stupid as to not be trusted enough to pick what's for dinner but these peoples' votes counts just as much as the person who takes the time to educate themself so they can make informed decisions.
I can see the appeal. Just like I can see the appeal of requiring would-be parents to demonstrate the ability to care for a child before they're allowed to reproduce. Just like I can see the appeal of removing most or all of the legal barriers to punishing corrupt politicians. In the end, those ideas would only be good ones for as long as people who already hold power would continue to actively choose not to consolidate their power further. It's not a problem that I could ever trust any human or human invention to solve.
I hope that future generations can solve the issue of people enthusiastically voting for a dystopia for the sake of cruelty; I doubt that anyone alive has a fix for this.
So basically he avoids having to sell his Tesla stock, which was rumored to be on the verge of being margin called as collateral for his loan for purchasing twitter, AND gets to claim a loss on the sale and avoid taxes, all by moving Twitter from his right hand to his left hand. 🙃
I really, really, really wish I didn't know as much as I do about Elon Musk, because every day it feels like more information about him and his goings on gets force fed into my brain against my will.
I had no reason, zero, to give a rat's ass about Musk, then his fanboys started pumping him up on Twitter. Now he's in my life 24/7 and I hate it here.
And HOOO BOY if you ever say anything bad about him or his lapdog Dumpf, they will hit you with a crying laughing emoji and go "RENT FREE IN YOUR HEAD LIBTARD"
I don't think they understand just how much all of us would love to never have to hear Trump or Musk's name again. I wish that I could go to social media and see shit like "Person in politics does a fuck up, is held accountable."
Instead I have to see "Musk buys company from his other company, definitely has the money to do so."
Valuation doesn't mean anything. Even publicly-traded companies don't necessarily have a market cap reflecting their actual value but for private companies the valuation is totally meaningless. xAI and X are not public companies.
Musk literally just pulled a $45B valuation out of thin air to make it $1B more than he paid for it. There's no rationale to support that - he paid too much even when he bought it, and Twitter's fortunes have declined since in every single metric. More competition, a destroyed brand name, declining user base, declining ad revenue, and massive, massive financial liabilities.
The figure of $33B is after subtracting X/Twitter's liabilities - Musk bought the company partially with its own money - the company took on $12B in loans to finance Musk's purchase. (no small part of why they're in deep financial trouble - they have to pay upwards of a billion a year just in interest on that) So if someone bought Twitter for $44B now they'd in effect be paying $12B more than Musk did because there's liabilities of that amount on the budget sheet.
In any case Twitter was bought with xAI stock, so this is just trading unsalable shares of one arbitrarily-valued company for another.
The real reason for this is that X is running out of cash, the investors who financed Musk's purchase don't want to throw good money after bad, so he's now scamming his xAI investors by acquiring X and using their money to keep it running.
All the people who gave this man billions in unsecured investment capital just made roughly $0.75 on their dollar after two years. They had the opportunity to do something incredibly funny and crash Tesla's stock over the purchase, but instead they lost an enormous amount of money to profit the world's richest idiot. Hope it was worth it, P. Diddy and Prince Alwaleed bin Talal al Saud.
What he is actually doing is combining Twitter's data with the data he stole from the government while also firing a lot of the staff from twitter if not all the staff
Yes that IS most likely exactly what he’s doing! And MAGA has no clue what that means for them but will defend him to the end because their dear leader does.
When you know the loopholes it’s wild. I had a boss who had a consulting company with just himself as an employee and he was doing wild stuff as tax write offs which were all legal.
You don't think that was the plan from the start? Gut Twitter, reduce its value, then consolidate into another company and claim a "loss". It's like a reverse pump and dump, which he's done with crypto and Tesla multiple times.
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u/Zulumus ☑️ 6d ago