After Elon Musk was called out by Senator Ron Wyden for using a Twitter poll to decide if he’ll pay taxes or not, the Tesla CEO decided to fire back with a super mature response about Wyden’s “pp.” The exchange happened on Saturday when Musk asked his 62 million+ followers if he should sell his Tesla stock, which would force him to owe taxes because he doesn’t draw a salary.
“Much is made lately of unrealized gains being a means of tax avoidance, so I propose selling 10% of my Tesla stock. Do you support this?” Musk tweeted. “I will abide by the results of this poll, whichever way it goes. Note, I do not take a cash salary or bonus from anywhere. I only have stock, thus the only way for me to pay taxes personally is to sell stock.”
While the poll ended with 57.9% in favor of Musk selling his stocks and cutting a check to Uncle Sam, Senator Wyden did not approve of the process and reiterated his support for taxing the wealthy.
“Whether or not the world’s wealthiest man pays any taxes at all shouldn’t depend on the results of a Twitter poll,” Wyden tweeted. “It’s time for the Billionaires Income Tax.”
Instead of replying with an intelligent rebuttal against Wyden’s tax proposal, Musk fired back, “Why does ur pp look like u just came?”
Why does ur pp look like u just came?
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 7, 2021
In what’s become a recurring theme, Musk’s tweeting ended up negatively affecting Tesla stock, which took a plunge thanks to his Twitter poll, which decided that Musk should sell 10% of his shares. Via Intelligencer:
In response to all this, Tesla’s value fell by almost three percent as of late Monday morning. (Also on Monday, Musk also changed his Twitter display name to “Lorde Edge,” which is probably a cryptocurrency thing, and designated his location as “Tröllheim,” which seems about right.)
Despite reports to the contrary, Musk’s “pp” tweet has not been deleted and was still up as of noon on Monday, which presumably didn’t help with Tesla’s stock issue. Then again, it’s nowhere near as bad as the time when he caused a nine percent drop by tweeting that “Tesla stock price too high imo.”