This is how new taxes start.
They claim only to apply to a small percentage of households in order to gain a majority vote, but then rapidly evolve to cover everyone. https://t.co/q6cWEcFBgr
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 4, 2025

04 Feb 2025
Slippery SlopeHistory, Income tax![]()
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Funktacular
Oh, our historically illiterate Elon. History has few taxes that have spread so widely. Rather, most taxes were excise taxes, which don’t “evolve to cover everyone.” The income tax is almost singular in that regard. Even Elon might be aware of certain event in 1941, when the scope of the tax vastly expanded.
The real question is why did we never scale-back the wartime government of the 1940s?
A. Squaretail
Dear Funktacular, Don’t tariff’s, by their very nature, effect everyone? Could make the same case for property taxes. Musk’s point is that the income tax was sold as costing few people a little money but grew way beyond that. The estate tax was similar but has waxed and wained over time. Other taxes apply to all but after starting small grow like cancers. Consider sales taxes, gas taxes, the various taxes on things like cellphones, air travel, liquor etc. All in all, while perhaps a little imprecise, Musk’s posts is true. That’s not to say you don’t have a good point yourself, but why so snarky?
Funktacular
I’m snarky because Musk is historically and culturally illiterate. To me, the mark of true intelligence is when one knows what one doesn’t know. On that count, he’s a fool.
Moreover, although I believe that he’s a brilliant engineer, and that SpaceX is a great company, he otherwise screams “fraud.”
Tesla is a hot mess of outdated technology held together by hype and vaporware. Their last CFO left $17M of compensation on the table to avoid signing off on the garbage financials. A tell is the low institutional ownership in the company (about 45% versus 73% for a company with viable products like Microsoft). It’s a ride for the rubes. Oh, and E.T. Barnum promised the rubes a 25% sales increase in 2025! Back in the 1980s and 90s, making such an unfounded statement was called “securities fraud.”
Twitter for free speech? Ha! More like Twitter for free content to train Grok. Other than exposing the government attempts to pressure old Twitter, Elon ain’t no friend to free speech.
Meanwhile, Elon is in bed with the Chinese, who lavishly supported his early battery factories. Now, there’s a little bit of Elon in every PLA weapons system (their aggressive AI strategy makes batteries critical for them). He also helped build the Chinese EVs that will bury Tesla overseas.
Now that Musk has sucked every dime he could out of liberals with his Green EV shtick, he’s grifting conservatives. A $500B Stargate slush fund is a good start. Of course, if we really wanted to supercharge AI development we’d reform the IPO market to enable small companies to access capital. That, however, would prejudice the huge tech companies and private equity funds that enjoy buying-up liquidity starved, potential rivals on the cheap.
F. Scott Fitzgerald and I both learned the same lesson at out mutual alma mater (hammered into me by a further 20 years in VC and PE): the rich are different than you and me, and not in a good way. Great wealth is almost invariably a moral and intellectual catastrophe.
One Guy
The Funktacular doth protest too much, methinks. Musk has become the left’s enemy because he wants to reduce the size of government, end waste and fraud and cut the deficit. Ask yourself why the left wants to increase the size of government, continue the waste and fraud and increase the deficit!
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