Ro, you’re lying and you know it.
You compared a man’s net worth to a country’s GDP. A balance sheet to a year of output. You went to Yale. You learned the difference between a stock and annual output flow.
But being a politician and lawyer, you love to lie and gaslight the economic illiterates, it’s your entire business model.
You want a 5% tax on Elon to fund free trade school for every American.
Trade school costs $80B/yr, you can’t even fund a year.
Elon doesn’t have $55B in cash. It’s stock. You know this.
To pay, he sells roughly $70B of Tesla and SpaceX shares, and the sale itself gets taxed on top. SpaceX raised $75B at its IPO this morning at a $1.77 trillion valuation.
Imagine him selling that amount every year.
Ro isn’t taxing Elon. He’s taxing everyone who gas exposure to the market. Every pension fund and index fund on the planet gets wrecked. And given Ro, he’ll insider trade and short before the bill passes.
And for what? To rip capital from the best allocator alive and hand it to the most incompetent institution in human history. Elon turned PayPal gains into Tesla and SpaceX: 120,000 jobs, launch costs down 90%, two industries that didn’t exist, a $1.77 trillion company from nothing.
You’ve never built anything. You’ve never employed anyone. You’ve never created a dollar of value in your life. You collect a government salary and demand tribute from men who do what you can’t.
Your machine spends $7 trillion a year and still runs a $1.8 trillion deficit. It loses up to $521 billion a year to fraud. More than your entire tax raises. The Department of Education went from $34 billion in 2000 to $268 billion in 2024. 8x the money. Reading scores at multi-decade lows. Trade schools still unfunded.
You don’t lack money. You lack competence, and you want Elon to subsidize it.
You haven’t donated your wealth. You haven’t moved into government housing. Empty your accounts first, Ro. Then preach.
Elon’s options get taxed as ordinary income at the top rate when exercised. Over $500 billion in lifetime taxes, the largest tax stream from one human ever. You want $55 billion now in a way that craters the shares the $500 billion depends on. Your tax doesn’t raise money. It kills the companies, kills the jobs, kills the pensions, and torches a bigger check already in the mail.
You’re the monkey in the middle, Ro. You can’t build. You can’t allocate. You can’t even count. So you eat from everyone else’s pie and call it fairness.