Tesla CEO Elon Musk Says He Is Selling His Last House
Tesla’s Elon Musk tweeted that he has decided to sell the last of the homes he owns a week after a report said he and other billionaires paid little or no income taxes for several years.
The electric-car maker’s chief executive officer tweeted this month that he has only one house in the San Francisco Bay area that is rented out for events and that if he sold, it “would see less use unless bought by a big family, which might happen someday”.
Musk, 49, first announced plans more than a year ago to sell his homes and most of his possessions as a way to blunt criticism of his wealth. Within days, he put two of his California properties on the market.
Last week, ProPublica reported that Musk, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, and Berkshire Hathaway chairman Warren Buffett have paid little income tax relative to their outsize wealth, citing a trove of Internal Revenue Service data on tax returns for thousands of the wealthiest Americans. Musk paid no federal income taxes in 2018 and less than $US70,000 in 2015 and 2017, according to the report.
An IRS official said last week that the disclosure of the data for billionaires including Bloomberg founder Michael Bloomberg, the founder and majority owner of Bloomberg LP, the parent company of Bloomberg News, has been referred to Federal Bureau of Investigation investigators as reported by Financial Review.
After the ProPublica report, Musk tweeted that he will keep paying income taxes in California in proportion with his time in the state, which he said will be significant.
Also, Musk said Tesla would allow transactions in bitcoin once mining is done with more clean energy.
Musk’s tweet followed last week’s unveiling of the Model S Plaid, Tesla’s fastest production car yet, with a 0 to 96.6km/h time of under two seconds.