billing the tax system as "the plunder of the people's labor" and trying to mobilize the ordinary citizen's natural discontent toward the state "for his own interests," mr. gatsby is hard at work trying to whip people into a frenzy and incite them to revolt.
first of all, elon musk and a salaried worker are not victims of the same tax regime, let's underline this. the ordinary citizen's income is cut at the source, meaning from their salary, before it even reaches their hands. there's no chance of evasion or avoidance. and because they're forced to consume the bulk of what they earn, they also pay every kind of consumption tax and indirect tax, in full, without exception. they're even exempt from, that is to say left out of, the tax refund system that benefits the rich. the system works in front of them in an utterly transparent and openly merciless way.
musk's fortune, on the other hand, grows through the shares he owns gaining value. the annual billions of dollars of wealth increase, totaling up to a trillion dollars, can stay untaxed because it's counted as "unrealized gains." he can even use this fortune as loan collateral without selling it and effectively spend it. meaning he's one of the people benefiting from the system's greatest advantages.
despite this, the rhetoric he uses places himself in the same position as a minimum-wage worker and creates an illusion of common victims being robbed by the state, the classic "we're in the same boat" line, if you will.
with this content he's using the people's justified grievance against the tax system in order to defend the interests of himself, one of the most advantaged actors in that very tax system. that's why what we see here isn't an ordinary tax critique, it's plutocratic populism.
sentences like "your time doesn't belong to you," "the state is seizing your labor," "your house isn't actually yours" in particular may look deep and philosophical at first glance, but when they come out of the mouth of the richest person in the world they take on a different meaning. these aren't the complaints of the worker, the civil servant, or the small tradesman who feels the tax burden the most heavily; they're the complaints of a billionaire a significant portion of whose fortune grew through the privileges the current tax system offers.
in short, what we see here isn't a plato-esque search for truth but an extremely modern technique of political communication: taking the people's anger toward the system and turning it into a shield for criticisms directed at his own fortune.
the net worth of a man who talks as though he suffers from the same tax woes as the people exceeds the annual budget of some countries. you can't help but say screw off.
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