by Dave Soulia, for FYIVT.com

Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Ro Khanna have introduced legislation imposing a 5 percent annual tax on billionaire net worth. Sanders’ office cites Elon Musk as the headline example, estimating his net worth at $833 billion and the resulting annual tax at roughly $42 billion. Rep. Becca Balint, amplifying the theme, has pointed to “record profits” at the top as evidence that the ultra-wealthy are not paying “their fair share.”

The policy argument is straightforward. The picture of what that wealth actually is bears closer examination.

Where the money is

According to Tesla’s Form 10-K filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, the company employed 134,785 people worldwide as of December 31, 2025. SpaceX, which is privately held, has been reported in recent third-party estimates at roughly 17,000 to 18,000 employees, including its Starlink division, which SpaceX’s own materials describe as a division of SpaceX rather than a separate company.

Add xAI, which acquired X (formerly Twitter) in 2025 and has been reported at roughly 5,000 to 5,300 employees with X’s remaining staff of approximately 2,800 folded under it, along with Neuralink at around 600 and The Boring Company at under 700. The combined direct payroll across Musk-controlled enterprises lands in the neighborhood of 160,000 people.

For scale, the Vermont Department of Labor reported total nonfarm payroll employment in Vermont at 312,600 jobs as of August 2025, the most recent month available before federal shutdown-related data delays. That puts the workforce directly employed by Musk’s companies at roughly half the size of every filled job in Vermont combined — private, public, healthcare, education, retail, manufacturing, government. All of it.

That figure counts only direct employees. Standard input-output modeling used by the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis recognizes that large manufacturing, aerospace, and infrastructure operations generate additional employment through suppliers, contractors, and construction. The specific multiplier varies by industry, but the principle is not disputed: the jobs footprint at this scale extends well beyond direct payroll.

What the wealth actually is

Sanders’ proposal applies to net worth, defined as assets minus debts, with the economists’ memo supporting the bill explicitly stating “no exemptions.” In Musk’s case, the overwhelming share consists of equity — ownership stakes in the same operating companies listed above. It is not held as cash. Extracting $42 billion per year would require some combination of stock sales, borrowing against shares, or restructuring of holdings. Those mechanisms are not theoretical; they determine share prices, dilute ownership, and affect a company’s ability to raise capital.

The economists’ memo accompanying the Sanders bill is candid about the long-term objective: a 5 percent annual wealth tax would cut the typical billionaire’s wealth in half over fifteen years relative to no tax. The design is intentional.

The existing tax footprint

The framing that the ultra-wealthy contribute little ignores what their companies already pay into public revenue through ordinary operations.

Property tax provides a measurable example. In Cameron County, Texas, home to SpaceX’s Starbase facility, county officials have reported SpaceX property at an assessed taxable value of approximately $266 million. At the county rate of $0.426893 per $100 of valuation, that translates to more than $1.13 million annually in county property tax once a long-standing abatement expires, with county collection beginning in 2026. The abatement applied only to Cameron County’s share; SpaceX has continued paying taxes throughout to other local entities, including the Brownsville Navigation District and area school districts.

Starbase is one site. Tesla operates Gigafactories in Texas, Nevada, and California, along with its Fremont assembly plant. SpaceX operates additional facilities in Hawthorne, California, and McGregor, Texas. Property tax is assessed locally, so no consolidated figure exists across all Musk-controlled operations. But those assets generate revenue for the jurisdictions hosting them — before counting corporate income taxes, payroll taxes, sales taxes, and individual income taxes paid by the 160,000 people on those payrolls.

The scale on the other side

The Sanders proposal also has to be measured against what the revenue it generates actually buys in federal terms. Per USAFacts, compiling Office of Management and Budget and Treasury data, total federal outlays in fiscal year 2025 reached $7.1 trillion — roughly $19.5 billion per day. Net interest on the public debt alone crossed $1 trillion for the first time in 2025, or about $2.7 billion per day.

At those rates, the $42 billion Sanders estimates collecting annually from Musk would fund roughly 2.2 days of federal operations, or about 15 days of interest payments on existing debt. Musk’s full $833 billion net worth, if somehow liquidated entirely without affecting share prices, would cover roughly six weeks of federal spending.

Federal spending is recurring and growing; the Musk asset base is finite. Extracting the annual tax would require mechanisms that touch the operating companies — stock sales, pledged shares, or structural changes — with downstream effects on the capital those companies use to hire, build, and expand. Liquidating the full position once produces six weeks of federal spending and then the asset base is gone, along with whatever portion of the 160,000 jobs depends on its continuity.

Two different arguments

Supporters of the Sanders-Khanna approach argue that concentrated wealth produces concentrated economic and political power, and that deliberately reducing that concentration — while funding public priorities — is a defensible goal. That is a coherent position.

What it is not is the same as the shorthand version deployed in political messaging by Sanders, Balint, and Khanna. A cartoon of idle treasure, spendable cash sitting untouched while families struggle, describes something different from an annual levy on ownership stakes in operating enterprises. The first is rhetorical. The second is mechanical, and the mechanics determine what happens to investment, employment, and capital structure downstream.

The scale figures — roughly 160,000 direct jobs, approaching half of Vermont’s entire employed workforce, against a federal spending machine that burns through the headline tax revenue in just over two days — do not answer the policy question. They do indicate that the assets under discussion are neither idle nor abstract, and that any serious debate has to reckon with what those assets are currently doing, and what replaces them if they are taxed away.