Musk sagt, dass eine 100-prozentige Besteuerung jedes Milliardärs kaum zu einer Senkung der Staatsverschuldung führen würde. Bernie sagt, besteuern Sie sie mit 5 %, und Sie sind 3.000 $ reicher

The richest person in the world and the most well-known person leading the cause against creating more people like him have many differing views on taxing the ultrawealthy.

But now, Elon Musk and Sen. Bernie Sanders, two men on opposite ends of the ideological spectrum, are using the same math to make opposite arguments for how much billionaires should be taxed, and how that money should be allocated.

In Musk’s view, collecting every cent billionaires rake in pales in comparison to federal debt, which is now hurling towards $39 trillion and counting.

“Even if you tax every billionaire in America at 100%, it barely makes a dent in the national debt,” Musk wrote on X in 2023. “In the end, the government will be forced to tax everyone to pay the debt.”

Sanders agrees—but he’s not looking to tax billionaires for all their worth and he’s not trying to eliminate the debt. Instead, he wants enough to give nearly three-quarters of the nation a nice check, offset cuts to federal health programs, and fund social services.

Read more: [https://fortune.com/2026/03/17/elon-musk-billionaire-tax-national-debt-bernie-sanders-3000/](https://fortune.com/2026/03/17/elon-musk-billionaire-tax-national-debt-bernie-sanders-3000/)

Musk is a welfare queen. Sucking up my tax dollars

The purpose of raising the taxes on billionaires isn’t to fill the government coffers, people like Musk like to brag that if taxes were raised on them, rather then taking the money and being taxed on it, they’d keep it in their company, denying it from the government. That money could then go to raises for employees, R and D, or other stuff that would improve the economy instead of being hoarded like Dragon’s gold! If that happens and what Musk says is true, then the higher taxes ARE DOING THEIR JOB! The purpose is to improve the economy, not for anyone, either billionaires or the government to hoard all the money and keep it from circulating!

Elon is using the same argument PregerU used more than a decade ago. They think taxes are when the government comes in and takes all your money. Its a very misleading and bad faith argument

I would prefer we go back to the corporate tax rate we had before the Reagan era tax cuts.

…so if the arguement is “don’t tax me because it barely does anything” then why am I also paying taxes that barely do anything?

The funniest thing about this is that the hidden cost of taxing billionaires at 100% pays off incalculably towards social mobility, innovation, political influence, environmental protection, human rights, the ending of forever wars & the corruption of politics, the ending of genocides, increasing the likelihood of things like land back/ land stewardship practices taking hold, granting free universal healthcare, ending human trafficking, giving true reparation efforts for Black America(and the rest of the globe!), advancing women’s rights, trans rights, solar and wind power, ending enshittifocation and price gouging, stopping social division, ending climate change, and basically every other problem we have.

Liquidating billionaires in every sense of the word is the most ethical and impactful and effective thing we can do to start saving the planet and we don’t even need to think about the tax part in the equation.

These arguements are always super disingenuous because there’s not actually a point or a reason to completely eliminating national debt, just keeping it manageable, and there’s no reason you’d have to tax them everything at once when higher taxes applied over time will allow the rich to still recoup their losses from the taxes and continue to pay taxes indefinitely. The ultra rich accumulate wealth at an absurd rate, so even if you tax them a significant portion of their wealth each year they can still maintain or even grow net worth

Painting a tweet from Musk three years ago and Sanders’ proposed Make Billionaires Pay Their Fair Share Act as two sides of the same coin is both misleading and disingenuous. 

Musk’s argument is hyperbolic and completely impractical. It’s also talking strictly about the national debt and where America is headed on this Republican spending spree.

Sanders’ argument keeps the billionaires as billionaires while helping use some of their acquired wealth to address the affordability crisis, which includes WAY more than $3,000 checks but also expands Medicare, saves cuts on the Affordable Care Act, pays public school teachers, builds affordable housing, and more. 

This is a poorly written article that tries to play both sides as if they were on equal footing when they aren’t. 

Wealth tax is best thought of as a way to prevent a bunch of insane freaks from controlling the government as opposed to reducing debt or paying for services.

I guess it really depends on what you are talking about.

Taxing them for one year doesn’t impact the debt all that much. We have a lot of debt. But it will significantly alter the yearly deficit.

And depending on what you actually tax it may not net that much. Details here matter a lot. For example, most billionaires have their wealth in “stuff”, they aren’t making that much standard taxable income each year unlike most of us who have almost everything as standard taxable income. Someone who is worth $10 billion might have 90% of that tied up in stocks and assets that aren’t normally taxed.

But it makes a lot more sense to tax the wealthy. They have money to give and derive most of that wealth off of systems and infrastructure paid for by the government. Someone with $10b doesn’t need another $10,000 (you can keep scaling this number up a few orders of magnitude as well) and would probably never even notice it but that makes a massive difference for most Americans.

Well Elon, let’s try it for forty years and see. That’s about how long it took everyone to see reganomics effects.

Bernie’s math assumes the billionaires will just sit there and let it happen and the government won’t lose 90% of it in administrative fees first.

The r/theydidthemathsub has already answered this question several times. Unfortunately, Elon is mostly correct.

Really muskrat, you live off subsidies for all of your businesses. That’s before we talk about what you pay your employees.

The rich will always tell us that taxing them is bad. They are liars and wealth hoarders.

Musk is a moron and a liar. These are the least of his negative traits.

Elon doesn’t do maths

The bottom 30% of American citizens have a new worth of zero and can barely afford necessities. They are going to make less of a dent. The people with the most money are the people who are going to have to pay the debt.

Elon Musk complaining about paying taxes when 40% of Tesla revenue comes from goverment subsidies is laughable. Space X is goverment contracts.

One of these two has a vested interest in not taxing billionaires. And then there’s Bernie.

Fuck this parasite all the way to Pluto

Why would anyone listen to advice a billionaire has about taxing billionaires?

Why the fuck 5%? What a pittance.
Does anyone else pay 5% tax?

Just to be clear for everyone. The national debt is not something you pay back like a car loan. Republicans like to use this credit card analogy to confuse people into thinking we’re supposed to pay it back like regular finances.

The debt serves a whole different purpose for a country like the US, it helps us maintain our status as the world reserve currency which keeps commodities prices in dollars and allows us to issue treasuries to other countries all over the world. It is a very stabilizing force to the dollar and has greatly increased the wealth of Americans.

You can’t let it grow out of control and it did get pretty hot during the last two crisis by Republican Presidents, but you just need to keeps its growth in line with GDP growth. Which you could do by slashing a lot of unnecessary military spending.

Republicans want it to sound like a crisis so you think only they can fix it, then they use it as an excuse to make you feel pain so they can cut taxes for corpos and the rich. And you’ll notice, in all this pain it never goes down.