A world-renowned economist said Monday that Elon Musk’s pledge to donate a share of his company, SpaceX, to every American child is not nearly enough to redress the exploding wealth inequality that he personifies.
Gabriel Zucman, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley and a leading inequality expert, wrote in a series of social media posts directed at Musk that “if you really want to help the American people, I have a better suggestion than charity: pay more taxes.”
“You, like your fellow billionaires, pay a lower effective tax rate than the average American,” Zucman wrote, pointing to his research on the tax rates of the wealthiest Americans.
Zucman and his colleagues estimated in a 2025 paper that the total effective tax rate of the 400 wealthiest US households “averaged 24% in 2018–2020 compared with 30% for the full population and 45% for top labor income earners.”
Based on available data and tax records obtained by ProPublica, Musk’s effective tax rate has been far lower than average. Between 2014 and 2018, Musk—whose wealth is mostly tied up in stock that is only taxed when it is sold—paid an effective federal rate of 3.27%.
“The American people don’t need billionaires making grand promises of generosity,” wrote Zucman. “They need billionaires to pay their fair share. All of them. Each year. How is it acceptable that billionaires pay a lower tax rate than the average American? The most effective way to do is with a billionaire wealth tax.”
Billionaires’s extremely low tax rates are fueling oligarchic power in the United States.Look at the wealth held by the richest billionaires relative to what’s produced in a given year in the US—a good measure of the influence their wealth can buy. The economic weight of extreme wealth now far exceeds its Gilded Age peak.
— Gabriel Zucman (@gabriel_zucman) October 19, 2026
Musk, whose net worth briefly surpassed $1 trillion earlier this year following SpaceX’s debut on the public market, pledged to distribute a share of the company to every American child. Based on the company’s current stock price, the donation would be worth around $11 billion—a tiny percentage of Musk’s total wealth.
“Giving 1% is better than giving 0%, and I applaud that,” Zucman wrote in his social media thread on Monday. “But Americans don’t need charity, as in 19th Century Britain. They need everybody to contribute through the tax system, in proportion to their ability to pay.”
Zucman expressed support for the Make Billionaires Pay Their Fair Share Act, legislation introduced earlier this year by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.). The bill would impose a 5% annual wealth tax on US billionaires, whose combined net worth surged past $9 trillion over the summer.
“This would still be small relative to your wealth,” Zucman said of the tax, “and yet would generate more than $4.4 trillion in revenue over the next decade. That would make a real difference to the lives of the American people. Owning one share in SpaceX won’t.”
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