"Honestly, I'm not Buffett's number one fan. He sat there all day reading the financial statements, super bored. Does anyone want this job? I don't think most people want to, I don't want to do this anyway. ”
Elon Musk, the world's richest man and CEO of Tesla, "complained" about the boring work of Buffett in the latest interview. At the same time, Musk also defended Buffett's personal wealth of about $100 billion.
On December 13, local time, Time magazine announced that Elon Musk was elected as the magazine's 2021 person of the year.
In an interview with Time magazine's Person of the Year, Musk was asked: "In today's huge gap between rich and poor, as the world's richest man, do you think an individual should have so much wealth?" ”
In fact, Musk cleverly answered this sharp question by borrowing Buffett's example. "He never makes crazy ostentatious spending. So while he has a high net worth, he's doing something economically useful, and he's very good at that, and perhaps he should keep him going. ”
In an investigation released by the nonprofit news organization ProPublica in June, Musk and billionaires such as Warren Buffett and Jeff Bezos were named and criticized. The report notes that the 25 richest people in the U.S. paid only $13.6 billion in taxes in total between 2014 and 2018, while their net worth increased by $401 billion. Calculated this way, the tax rate they actually pay is 3.4 percent, which is almost negligible compared to their vast wealth.
The report has intensified calls from Democratic politicians for a "Billionaires Income Tax." The tax is levied on about 700 super-rich people who hold more than $1 billion in assets or earn more than $100 million a year for three consecutive years. If this tax policy is implemented, Musk will pay up to $50 billion in taxes over five years.
Screenshot of the official website of the United States Senate
In the face of this criticism, Buffett has previously pledged to donate more than 99% of his net worth to charity. Since 2006, he has donated half of his nearly 475,000 Berkshire Class A shares. Musk publicly opposed the proposal on social media, saying the U.S. government's huge fiscal spending was the problem. He warned the American people: "When they spend all other people's money, they will find you." ”
In this interview, Musk is also unabashed from accusations that these politicians are trying to control private assets. "The government's expropriation of assets is actually driven by a group of politicians. They are saying that resources should not be controlled by private individuals, but by governments. In other words, they want to control the asset. ”
Musk also responded to many negative news surrounding him personally as well as Tesla in interviews with Time magazine.
Regarding several self-driving safety accidents at Tesla vehicles this year, Musk said that statistics make it clear that non-autonomous driving has a higher accident rate than autonomous driving. "It's not that autonomous driving is perfect. Obviously, we still have a lot of work to do to get away from autonomous driving that doesn't require human control at all. If it can be done in complex traffic situations, there is almost no human intervention, or the probability of accidents under automatic driving is much lower than that of human driving. At that point, it will be reasonable for cars to drive themselves without much human attention. ”
At the same time, Musk also said that he is not worried that Ford, GM, Rivian, Lucid and other car companies will threaten Tesla's dominance. He stressed that Tesla's mission will always be to set an example for the automotive industry and hopes that others will also join in building electric vehicles to accelerate the transition to sustainable energy.
Sitting on a $300 billion fortune and 65 million followers, Musk is both the richest man of all time and one of the most influential people in the world. As once the world's richest man, Buffett has fully affirmed the achievements of the current richest man Musk, while also criticizing his controversial remarks on Twitter.
Asked if childish remarks such as arguing with those in power and taunting Bezos on Twitter would have a negative impact on his brand, Musk said: "Frankly, I haven't thought much about brand optimization, which is evident in my tweets. Usually it hurts myself, and sometimes I think it's humorous, but other people don't think so. ”
For the "choose the red pill" remark released in May this year, Musk said that he did not consider the political color contained in the sentence, and he only referred to the line that "The Matrix" chose to pursue the truth. "Does this have the implication of accepting right-wing dogmas and the like?" I do not know. ”
"Red Pill" stems from a conversation in the protagonist of the Matrix movie: Morpheus tells Neo that he has been living in a computer-simulated world and gives Neo two choices: either eat the blue pill and go back to the virtual world and forget everything; or eat the red pill to learn the truth about the Matrix.
The US "Variety" weekly mentioned that "taking the red pill" usually represents conservative political beliefs in online culture, which may mean that a person's political stance has turned to the right, and is often used in Internet forums related to Trump or male rights organizations.
USA Today believes that although the tweet does not read more, the political implications are obvious to Musk. Musk has been outspoken about California's response to the coronavirus pandemic and even violated a government ban to allow Tesla manufacturing plants to resume production at the peak of the pandemic.
The incident caused a lot of public opinion at the time, and Musk was credited with making a controversial and poor management choice that made its employees take unnecessary risks. In the interview, Musk explained that there was a misunderstanding, "The reality is that other U.S. automakers have begun to resume work, and we are still in lockdown, just because our factory is located in the California Bay Area." In fact, the California government has allowed manufacturing to resume work, but Alameda County does not allow Tesla to resume work. ”
When it comes to his views on vaccination, Musk said that he is very much in favor of vaccination, but he is also opposed to mandatory vaccination. "I don't think that's what should be done in the United States, we should encourage or try to persuade people to get vaccinated, we shouldn't force people to get vaccinated by firing and so on."