Do you think Elon Musk needs a tax cut?

In 2025, we should resolve to give up the fantasy that we will ever be able to shame the billionaires out of anything.

Take Elon Musk. Please.

After spending the 2024 election drowning voters in more than a quarter billion dollars of disinformation and then seeing his net worth rise by some $170,000,000,000, he is touting his plans to gut the government, specifically targeting the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau that has returned more than $19 billion wrongly taken from Americans.

Elon is an immigrant who is a nativist, a natalist who has more kids than any one human could ethically parent (if he's involved in any of the grind of parenting at all), perhaps the single biggest beneficiary of taxpayer subsidies in human history now obsessed with cutting government investments for everyone else, and a gamer with absolutely no game.

It's impossible to shame someone who has decided to make his hypocrisies his identity. And we shouldn't try. Shame is for liberals and people who have to worry about gaps in their resumes.

However, we should not miss the opportunity he has presented by making himself the most visible face of the Trump administration—somehow more annoying and omnipresent than Trump himself. Because one of the biggest fights of early 2025 will be over whether we give Elon Musk another tax cut.

First of all, some concessions. They're going to do it. The entire Republican Party is designed to give rich people tax cuts and to use tax cuts, in general, to fuel inequality and summon the argument to cut the enormously popular things the government does:

"Taken together, the Bush tax cuts, their bipartisan extensions, and the Trump tax cuts would be responsible for more than 100 percent of the increase in the projected debt ratio, with the Trump tax cuts responsible for nearly one-third of the future growth in the debt ratio above 2024 levels."

All they need is every Republican in the House and 50 in the Senate to vote to keep Elon's tax cuts. Barring spontaneous combustion, that will happen—even though we know from the American Taxpayer Relief Act of 2012 that it's possible to extend Republican tax cuts without giving them to the wealthiest Americans who will benefit the most from Trump's tax scam yet need it the least:

We also know these tax cuts will be consistently unpopular, like the last ones, and will likely be even more severe.

Policy-wise, we're screwed. That's the story of the next two years, at least. We can only mitigate harm, place down markers, and make sure Republicans pay political costs.

But this could be the opening shot of a movement that could eventually end this Gilded Age, given a tremendous amount of luck, savvy, and opposition built from pain, dismay, and virtue. Elon's new tax cuts give us the perfect moment to begin the argument against the existence of billionaires.

In the new episode above of Andrea Pitzer's podcast Next Comes What, which I help produce, Andrea offers a few tactics for dealing with family members who may be too MAGA for your tastes, which—in my case—would be any amount of MAGA at all. Her advice is based on years of teaching self-defense and offers concrete ways to steady yourself when that's the hardest thing to do.

I have a suggestion, too. Using Andrea's suggestion to quiet your voice when things get heated, ask your MAGA-leaning friends, families, and enemies if they think Elon Musk needs a tax cut.

Then nod.

The point isn't to convince them of anything. It's just to get them thinking—thinking about the prospect of giving a man worth about $454.1 billion another break. You don't need to get them thinking about what he's done with his money to make his one vote count more than anyone else in American history. You don't need to get them thinking that Elon could give away $1 every second for the next 14,396 years and still not run out of money. You don't even need them to consider the fairness of 800 or so billionaires owning far more than the bottom 50% of America. You're not even trying to explain that Elon wants you to pay for his tax cut with your Social Security, Medicaid, or Medicare.

Just ask if you think it's fair that Elon Musk—who already pays a tax rate lower than most Americans, only 3.8% from 2014 to 2018, as average Americans paid 13.3%—gets another tax cut.

And if they say yes, which they probably will, just let them sit with that for a while—in perfect silence. Because this isn't for them; it's for everyone else in the room.