Musk says his tax bill this year will be $11 billion, and he’s probably right: The filings he has made with the Securities and Exchange Commission about his recent stock trades back up that massive number.
Musk revealed the $11 billion total in a tweet Sunday that was otherwise short on details.
This is not significantly different from what he had tweeted last week when, in the midst of a Twitter war with Sen. Elizabeth Warren, he said he’d pay the largest individual tax bill in history this year.
That would be a massive change from some recent years. An investigation by ProPublica found that Musk, and fellow billionaires such as Jeff Bezos and Michael Bloomberg, legally paid zero in income taxes in 2018.
Musk, the world’s richest person, doesn’t earn a cash salary or bonus. He’s instead been paid through stock options, giving him the right to buy shares of Tesla (TSLA) at a price equal to the market price at the time the options are issued, but likely well below their value at the time they are exercised.
Musk received 25.5 million split-adjusted options in 2012, and had 22.9 million of those options vest over subsequent years as Tesla hit certain operational and financial targets. But he didn’t have to pay taxes on those options until he used them to buy shares.
Since that block of options is due to expire in August 2022, Musk finally started the process of turning them into shares of stock in early November. And he documented those trades in SEC filings, as company insiders are required to do.
When he exercises the options, the value of the newly purchased shares are taxed as income — a 40.8% rate for someone in Musk’s tax bracket.
And that is where the huge tax bill comes from.
As part of the process of exercising the options, Musk has been selling a portion of the newly acquired shares to cover the withholding tax due on the trades, according to his filings. Those sales so far have totaled 7.5 million shares, bringing in $7.8 billion so far, including the exercise price…
So, all told, the federal tax bill on his 2021 stock trades comes to about $8.4 billion.
But he’s likely not done yet.
