MartianNight
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User ID: 1244
You write this as if the concept of a wealth tax is completely unexplored territory, but in reality many countries already have a wealth tax, including most European countries. They simply assess your net worth for tax purposes on the basis of the assets you own: bank balance, stocks, bonds, property, etc. For private companies it's based on the book value of the company according to the latest financial statement. For shares of a publicly traded company it's simply the stock price at December 31 multiplied by the number of shares you owned.
So if the US wanted to create a wealth tax, it's not that hard to figure out. You can just copy the tax law from e.g. Switzerland.
If the government were to take shares away from Musk to take partial ownership of his companies
Ah, I see there's a misunderstanding here on what it means to tax a person's wealth. The government does not want to be paid in shares. They want to be paid in cash, where the amount is a percentage of your net worth. How you raise the money to pay your tax bill is entirely up to you. You can use other sources of income, borrow against your shares, sell stock, whatever.
In theory this can be tricky for people who are cash poor, own a lot of stock, but are restricted from selling it (e.g. immediately after an IPO) but in practice this is not a problem. All billionaires in America have figured out how to buy mansions, yachts and private jets while avoiding anything that resembles a taxable event. I'm sure they can figure out how to raise cash to pay their tax bill, too.
"Worst" case companies will start paying dividends and real CEO salaries again. They only stopped doing that because it allows shareholders and CEOs to dodge taxes under the American tax regime (since dividend and salary payments are taxed as income, while capital gains are only taxed when they are realized, which can be deferred indefinitely). If that trend is reversed nothing of value is lost.
MartianNight
5d ago
Based on a market cap of 2.5 trillion and 18.7 billion/year revenue, SpaceX has an EV/R of around 135. (For reference, an EV/R of 3.57 is typical for aerospace companies according to the first source I could find.)
Clearly the valuation is almost entirely speculative rather than based on current fundamentals. Of the three segments, it seems like the AI branch has the highest growth potential.
Here's another random article: Top analyst: 71% of SpaceX’s $2 trillion value rests on AI.. Of course, that's also just an (expert) opinion, but the fundamental argument seems sound.
Why would you pay >100x revenue for the space company when they already cornered half the market? Starlink already has over 10 million users; how much bigger can that number realistically get when most people will only use satellite internet as a last resort, when fixed and mobile networks aren't available? The only part that doesn't have an obvious ceiling like that is xAI.
MartianNight
5d ago
I'm not sure what your definition of fake internet shit is, but obviously a large (majority?) share of the SpaceX valuation is xAI; it's not all about rockets and space. And xAI is essentially a copy-cat of OpenAI/Anthropic/the other tech companies chasing AI.
As for the space operations of SpaceX, it's not really clear to me what kind of innovation you expect here. In 2025, SpaceX already launched more rockets than the rest of the world combined. They've established a reputation as being cost effective and very reliable, which is great but also means it's hard to drive costs down further or become even more reliable. From that perspective, it seems like it's practically impossible to significantly grow their core operations.
It's a bit more complicated than just 0.38% because the tax rate is progressive, plus there is a municipal tax that is a percentage of the cantonal tax added on top (typically around 50%). I think you can get up to around 1% in the worst case, but it's mostly theoretical because in practice rich people move to a place where they get taxed less, unless they are either extremely principled or they really want to live in one of the major cities no matter the cost.
The point is that these taxes are charged every year. 38% would be insanely high: in just 10 years you'd have lost >99% of your wealth. That's not reasonable.
By comparison, at a 0.5% rate you pay e.g. $5000 per million dollars in savings. Over 70 years, you'd lose 30%. If you have a top rate of 1%, then you lose 9,5% in 10 years, or 50% in 70 years. This strikes me as reasonable, especially since you can usually generate some return on your wealth too (the US stock market has yielded >10% on average in the past decade even compensating for inflation).
I understand that there are some people who want that, but I don't think those are realistic proposals, in that you wouldn't be able to pass them into law even at the state level, and if you could, the main effect would be driving out billionaires and businesses, rather than generating a huge amount of tax revenue.
I'm rather more interested in proposals that:
Right, it's impossible for Musk to raise $400 billion all at once, that's why the wealth tax should be a small annual percentage instead. Selling 1% of his shares each year wouldn't tank the stock price the way that selling 30% would. But you're still getting 10 billion a year out of him alone.
I don't buy the concern about Musk losing control of the company. Musk already uses his class B shares with 10x voting power to maintain >80% control with <50% of the shares. He can sell 75% of those shares and maintain majority control. Or use tricks like equity swaps to raise money without losing his shares. Or just make the company pay 1% dividend per year (though that requires it to become actually profitable). Plenty of ways to pay taxes while remaining both CEO and majority shareholder.
So given that Musk can stay in control and pay a hypothetical wealth tax, it's not clear to me what value you think is being destroyed by taxing wealthy people somewhat. Unless you say it's always better for billionaire to have a dollar than the government, on the basis that billionaire's investments are more beneficial to society than whatever the government wastes it's money on (healthcare, pensions, education, foodstamps, the military), but that's highly debatable.
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