Only way to pay taxes: Elon Musk asks social media if he should sell Tesla stock

Tesla CEO Elon Musk is asking his social media followers whether he should go ahead and sell 10% of his stock in the electric-vehicle company. The tweet comes amid pressure in Washington to increase taxes on billionaires like Musk himself.

A section of the Democratic Party has been pushing for billionaires to pay taxes when the price of the stocks they hold goes up. The proposed taxes will apply even if they don’t sell any shares.

These proposals are based on a concept called “unrealized gains,” and Musk is sitting on a lot of them with a net worth of roughly $300 billion, which makes him the richest person on the planet.

“Much is made lately of unrealized gains being a means of tax avoidance, so I propose selling 10% of my Tesla stock. Do you support this?,” the billionaire, who also owns SpaceX, tweeted on Saturday.

By the evening Eastern time, a little more than two hours after Musk’s initial tweet, 54% said yes out of a total of 876,189 votes.

Much of Musk’s wealth is held in shares of Tesla, which does not pay him a cash salary. “I only have stock, thus the only way for me to pay taxes personally is to sell stock,” he tweeted.

Musk, who is known for his sometimes flippant tweets, said he would “abide by the results of this poll.”

Recently, Musk had offered to donate a portion of his wealth to end world hunger, provided the United Nations (UN) World Food Programme (WFP) increased scrutiny on spending for the programme. 

The offer was prompted by WFP director David Beasley’s remarks to CNN that billionaires like Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and Musk should “step up now on a one-time basis,” claiming a fraction of their net worth would help 42 million people “that are literally going to die if we don’t reach them.”

He challenged the WFP to “describe exactly how $6B will solve world hunger, I will sell Tesla stock right now and do it.”