ELON Musk has hit out at critics after being accused of “freeloading” in a bitter row over taxes.
The Tesla founder is the world’s richest man with a net worth of $278billion, ahead of Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and Microsoft’s Bill Gates.
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Musk was recently blasted as “the world’s richest freeloader” by US senator Elizabeth Warren after he was named Time Magazine’s 2021 Person of the Year.
“Let’s change the rigged tax code so The Person of the Year will actually pay taxes and stop freeloading off everyone else,” she tweeted.
In a public Twitter spat, Musk dubbed her “senator Karen” and told her to “stop projecting”.
On Monday he added fuel to the fire, revealing the eye-watering tax bill he expects for 2021.
“For those wondering, I will pay over $11 billion in taxes this year,” he tweeted.
The entrepreneur claims he will “pay more taxes than any American in history this year”.
Musk’s haul of businesses include electric car maker Tesla, which is worth about $1trillion.
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He recently sold almost $14billion worth of shares in the company.
According to ProPublica earlier this year, Mr Musk paid nothing in federal income taxes for 2018, and less than $70,000 in 2015 and 2017.
Speaking about it on US TV last week, Senator Warren said: “The world’s richest freeloader evidently has a very thin skin.
“But you know the part that makes me angry about this?
“It’s on behalf of every public school teacher, every waitress, every computer programmer, every street cleaner who actually paid taxes, and that means they paid more than Elon Musk did in federal income taxes.
“And that’s just not right, and it means the system is broken.
“But the days when these guys not only get to rake it all in, but then rub everybody else’s nose in it while they head off into outer space and declare how they did this all on their own when they were subsidised by the federal government and subsidised by every waitress and public school teacher who paid their taxes’ is over.
“This is wrong and Elon Musk needs to eat a big dish of that.”
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Elon Musk sells over $286MILLION of Tesla shares after Twitter poll shaves $60billion off company’s market value
In other news, iPhone owners are being driven up the wall by a potentially dangerous Bluetooth bug.
People have been urged to be careful if someone has left their iPhone in the room as they could be using it to spy on you.
And Pornhub has exposed what horny Americans and Brits have been looking for in the past year – and there’s a new favourite in town.
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This post first appeared on Thesun.co.uk
