Elon Musk asked his Twitter followers if he should sell 10 percent of his Tesla stock?

Tesla CEO and the world's richest man, Elon Musk, tweeted a poll on Saturday asking his Twitter followers if he should sell 10 percent of his stock in the automaker, apparently to pay more tax. .

"Having a tax evasion instrument has made a lot of unrealized gains lately, so I propose to sell 10% of my Tesla stock," he tweeted. He said in a later tweet that he would follow the results of the election "whatever." As of Sunday morning, "yes" answers were the dominant one, with 57 percent of the more than 3.1 million votes.

Musk was a vocal critic of a proposal to tax some of the wealthiest Americans on publicly traded assets for unrealistic gains. Ron Wyden (D-Oregon), if the property has increased in value even though the individual did not sell the property, the individual must pay tax on the unrealized gain. It would basically eliminate the tax loophole that lets billionaires defer capital gains taxes indefinitely, while still being able to borrow against that money.

"After all, they run out of other people's money and then they come for you," Musk tweeted in response to a tweet expressing concern about the proposal in October.

Wyden responded to Musk's view, tweeting Saturday: "Whether the world's richest man pays any taxes shouldn't depend on Twitter poll results, it's time for billionaires' income tax."

Saturday also wasn't the first time Musk had floated the idea of selling some Tesla shares. Musk told journalist Kara Swisher at the Code conference in September that he plans to sell a large portion of his Tesla stock options before they expire. "I have a bunch of [stock] options expiring early next year, so that's a big block of options that we'll be selling in Q4," he said.

Swisher asked if he was surprised by how much Tesla stock has risen. "I've said on the record that I think [Tesla's] stock is priced too high," Musk later said. "What do I have to do? I'm not going to raise it."

ProPublica journalist Jesse Eisinger pointed out on Twitter that the third tweet in Musk's Saturday thread - "Note, I don't take cash salaries or bonuses from anywhere. I only have stock, so it's up to me to personally pay taxes." Is." The only way out is to sell stocks” - appeared to confirm the news site's reporting on how the super-rich avoid paying income tax.

"Thanks for confirming our story: that the super-rich income tax is essentially voluntary," Eisinger tweeted, noting that Musk had previously called the story "misleading."

Musk's Twitter poll had only a few hours left on Sunday. We'll update this post if he makes more comments.