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Elon Musk to Owe Estimated $2.1 Billion After Jury Finds He Misled Twitter Investors Before 2022 Buyout (text.npr.org)
submitted 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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A jury has found Elon Musk liable for misleading investors by deliberately driving down Twitter's stock price in the tumultuous months leading up to his 2022 acquisition of the social media company for $44 billion. But it absolved him of some fraud allegations, finding that he did not "scheme" to mislead investors.

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[–] 59 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (7 children)

I don't understand why these courts charge a set fine for stuff like this. This is clearly an extremely unique case. The man is 20% shy of being a trillionaire.

What really needs to be done is they need to charge a percentage of his profits. Say 20 to 30%.

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  • [–] 2 points 6 months ago (1 child)

    This idea needs to be fine tuned. The problem is that parasitic oligarchs don’t have a real income.

    For those who don’t know, the parasite oligarchs take the vast amount of stock that they own and take it to a bank. The bank gives the parasite a loan with the stock as collateral. Right off the vat, the parasite gets to claim debt on their taxes. The parasite will then take the loan and use it to buy more stock or companies or anything that generates more wealth.

    Loan gets paid off with the generated wealth. Due to generous tax loop holes put into place by politicians). The parasite gets to claim that they didn’t make any money and get a tax bill of zero and sometimes a refund.

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  • [–] 1 point 6 months ago

    This scheme is called “buy, borrow, die.” It’s legal. The stocks are typically not sold off, so capital gains taxes are avoided. Loans and debt are not taxable. It’s effectively profit with relatively low risk. The point is that the level of entry is extremely high. One must already have large amounts of money to qualify for these kinds of loans.

    The problem, of course, is that if you start taxing debt, like people taking out loans, it’s not just going to be millionaires, as you called them “parasites,” paying those taxes. It will be everybody taking out a loan, including the poor and the middle class.

    The proposed solution is to tax people based on net worth. If you’re worth above a certain amount, then you get taxed at a very high percentage.

    With that being said, if that were the case and Elon Musk were taxed like this, he would only pay around $12–$13 billion out of the roughly $800 billion he already has. In essence, it would still be pocket change to him.

    At this point, wealthy people not paying taxes has become a kind of game, who can pay the least.

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