Elon Musk: Don’t Tax My Billions, I’m Using Them to Take You to Mars

Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, who is the world’s richest person, protested the Democrats’ proposed tax on billionaires’ wealth on Wednesday, saying that he intended to use his vast fortune to take humanity to Mars and save the species itself.

“My plan is to use the money to get humanity to Mars and preserve the light of consciousness,” he tweeted, responding to a news report that calculated that he might pay $50 billion in new taxes in the first five years of the Democrats’ proposed plan.

My plan is to use the money to get humanity to Mars and preserve the light of consciousness

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 28, 2021

The money raised by such a tax would still be paltry compared to the many trillions of dollars Democrats want to spend on new social programs, which are to accompany much smaller — but still expensive — plans to spend money on infrastructure.

Democrats have yet to come up with a compromise proposal, after launching an effort to push $3.5 trillion in social spending through the Senate “reconciliation” process, alongside a bipartisan $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill the House has yet to pass.

House Democrats are holding the latter bill hostage to the former. The party’s so-called “progressive” wing says it will not vote for the infrastructure bill without a commitment by the Senate to pass the larger bill. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi is siding with them, but they face opposition from Sens. Joe Manchin (D-WV) and Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ), who have been opposed to some of the party’s more ambitious spending proposals, and who have opposed many of its tax ideas as well.

Musk, whose Tesla recently hit $1 trillion in market value, has a net worth of some $233 billion, more than Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, his rival in private space exploration. There are 724 billionaires in the U.S., barely more than the 698 in China.

The South African-born entrepreneur has a lifelong obsession with taking humanity to Mars, believing that the species needs a hedge against possible extinction on its home planet. That fixation has driven his investment and innovation strategies.

Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. His recent book, RED NOVEMBER, tells the story of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary from a conservative perspective. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.