Tesla Inc.’s Elon Musk tweeted that he’s 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.
Decided to sell my last remaining house. Just needs to go to a large family who will live there. It’s a special place.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) June 14, 2021
The electric-car maker’s chief executive officer tweeted earlier this month that he only has 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 some day.”
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.com Inc. CEO Jeff Bezos and Berkshire Hathaway Inc. 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 $70,000 in 2015 and 2017, according to the report.
An IRS official said last week that the disclosure of the data for billionaires including Bloomberg LP 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.
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. He moved to Texas last year and said he now rents a roughly $50,000 house in Boca Chica from Space Exploration Technologies Corp., which has a launch site in the area.
My primary home is literally a ~$50k house in Boca Chica / Starbase that I rent from SpaceX. It’s kinda awesome though.
Only house I own is the events house in the Bay Area. If I sold it, the house would see less use, unless bought by a big family, which might happen some day.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) June 9, 2021
This article was provided by Bloomberg News.
