Sounds desperate.

5 years ago he reckoned he'd solve world hunger for the paltry sum of $6b.

Money is wasted on billionaires.

"Billionaires don't actually have cash."

"If you taxed them they'd have to sell stock and it would crash the market."

If that sounds like a crazy amount, just remember that it's only 0.05% of his net worth. Proportionally it's the equivalent of me making a fifty-dollar donation.

And he’s gotten tens of billions in contracts from the government, left and right. He’s going to rake it in, investment spending when you have that much ill-gotten wealth.

Free Speech.

Anthony Kennedy, eat a big bag of dicks.

Yup. It's practically his union dues

Right? "Only on paper" appears to be at least somewhat inaccurate.

Where is this guy supposed to come up with 5% of his wealth in the next 5 years?? He's clearly got huge ad buying bills to pay. Poor chap.

This is what always makes me scratch my head. If winning was that important to him, why not dump a cool 10 billion into winning?

Musk doesn't have hundreds of billions in cash, but he does have hundreds of billions in buying power.

The way the CEO/elite stock-holding class does this is by borrowing against the stock as collateral. That way they incur zero tax for capital gains, have zero direct exposure, and since banks specially cater to the ultra-wealthy with relationship managers, they basically have concierge-like access to whatever funds they want correlated perfectly with that magical "imaginary" wealth valuation.

Fortunately intelligence hasn't been wasted on them.

Which means they could pay taxes using the same trick.

This is why I want to forcibly dissolve the stock market with no chance of liquidation. Imagine how many of these fuckwits would kill themselves if the stock market servers and it's backups were destroyed.

Because it's all a game to him. Like golf. The lowest amount he can spend "wins". It won't really materialy affect him either way; it's just a fun little power trip.