The tiresome Jimmy Kimmel recently outdid himself in the hypocrisy and dishonesty departments when he replaced his unfunny monologue with a meanspirited personal attack on Elon Musk. Laughing at his ugly monologue required either complete ignorance on the part of Kimmel’s audience or a sycophantic willingness to overlook Kimmel’s dishonesty.
Kimmel began by announcing what got his panties in a twist:
Tomorrow SpaceX will reportedly launch the biggest IPO in history. An IPO is when a private company starts selling shares to the public for the first time. And once SpaceX does that, Elon Musk is expected to become the first ever trillionaire in the history of the world. I’ll hold for applause. … And what makes that even more unsettling is that this man, our first trillionaire, the richest man in the world, is also one of the weirdest people we’ve ever seen on this planet.
Musk is the one of the weirdest people “we’ve” ever seen on this planet? Quite a claim for a denizen of Hollywood. But maybe Kimmel is just that ignorant.
Maybe Kimmel has never heard of the weirdos (in no particular order) Crispin Glover, Andy Kaufman, Nicholas Cage, Michael Jackson, Divine, Tiny Tim, Marilyn Manson, Sam Smith, Bjork, Salvador Dali, Howard Hughes, Frank Zappa, Hetty Green, Emperor Elagablus, the Marquis de Sade, Friedrich Nietzsche, Jeremy Bentham, Diogenes of Sinope, Timothy Leary, L. Ron Hubbard, William Burroughs, and Shulamith Firestone.
Maybe Kimmel’s never heard of the weirdo killers Ted Bundy, Jeffrey Dahmer, John Wayne Gacy, and Richard Speck.
Then there were the weirdos who killed at scale: Stalin, Hitler, and Pol Pot.
And Musk definitely isn’t as weird as America’s growing contingent of crossdressing oddballs like “Christine” Jorgensen, “Renee” Richards, “Marsha” P. Johnson, “Sylvia” Rivera, Martin “Martine” Rothblatt, James “Jennifer” Pritzker, “Laverne” Cox, RuPaul, Bruce “Caitlyn” Jenner, Ellen “Elliot” Page, Tim “Sarah” McBride, “Chase” Strangio, and Will “Lia” Thomas.
Kimmel is spitting mad that Musk stands to become the world’s first trillionaire and expresses his petulance and envy in the unseemly way we’ve come to expect from leftists:
Basically, this maneuver could make Elon a trillionaire and your parents Walmart greeters. … It’s hard for our brains to conceptualize that. I mean, we know trillion is a number, but it’s so large … we can’t fathom it. The same way we know like Elon has a lot of kids, but we can’t fathom him getting laid, right?
Kimmel is unfunny in a vulgar, adolescent, mean-girl way.
In an failed effort to mock and shame Musk for being a brilliant and wildly successful entrepreneur, Kimmel illustrates the scale of a trillion dollars:
If you tried to count out loud to a trillion, you would be counting until the year 33,736. A trillion dollars is 10 billion $100 bills. If you stack them up, the pile would be almost 700 miles high, as tall as 123 Mount Everests. With that kind of money, Elon could buy every NFL team, all of them, and he’d still have 773 billion left, which he could use to buy all 30 major league baseball teams, every NBA team, every Wendy’s, every Target store, the Beatles entire music catalog. He could buy Nike, Macy’s, and every Hyundai Elantra ever produced. and would still have $260 billion, $50 million left over.
Of course, Musk doesn’t have one trillion dollars piled up in a safe somewhere. His net worth is one trillion dollars—a colossal net worth to be sure—but there are other people with eye-popping net worth exceeding $200 billion, including Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg.
Kimmel himself has a net worth of $50 million, which to most Americans is an astounding amount of wealth for a 58-year-old man.
For those Americans with a net worth approaching zero, it’s difficult to comprehend what $50 mil looks like, so I’ll help illustrate it.
If you counted one number per second, 24 hours a day without stopping, it would take one year and seven months to reach fifty million. Fifty million dollars is 500,000 $100 dollar bills. If you stack up all those $100 dollar bills, Kimmel’s pile would be almost 705 feet high or almost the height of the Eiffel Tower. With $50 million, Kimmel could buy 5-6 Manhattan luxury penthouses and about 2,500 new cars.
Kimmel, the anti-conservative insult comic—and I use the term “comic” loosely—reached new lows of dishonesty in suggesting Musk is a tax cheat:
Elon Musk came to the United States from South Africa in 1995, the son of a humble emerald mine owner, and he is so grateful to this country that allowed him to become a trillionaire. Tesla paid almost no federal income tax over the past 3 years. You know, for a guy who has been openly cheering immigrants getting kicked out of the country for stealing from us, sure seems like an immigrant who’s been stealing from us.
The emerald mine story has been widely disputed, with the most consistent online rumor claiming Musk’s father Erroll once had “a share” in an emerald mine but that he provided no money to Musk who worked his way through college finishing his education with $100,000 in debt. In other words, Musk is a self-made man.
Kimmel implies without having the cojones to outright assert that Tesla has cheated the government out of taxes. It’s likely Kimmel chose instead to insinuate Musk cheated because he knows Tesla reduced its tax liability in the same legal and commonplace way every other large corporation does: by availing itself of the tax incentives created by lawmakers. Those large corporations include the corporation that owns Kimmel’s show: Disney.
Corporations legally reduce their tax liability through deductions, credits, and carryforwards. These legal means to reduce tax liability are the government’s means of incentivizing and shaping corporate investment and innovation. These are not “loopholes.”
If Musk is “stealing” from Americans because his company uses tax laws as they are intended to be used, then Disney is stealing from Americans as well. And surely, multimillionaire Kimmel doesn’t want to work for any company guilty of theft.
Kimmel neglected to mention that Tesla has created about 80,000 to 95,000 direct jobs in the United States, and SpaceX has created another 22,000 direct jobs here. In addition, Tesla and SpaceX have created thousands more indirect jobs, for example, supply chain jobs, local community jobs, and regional infrastructure jobs. All these employees pay taxes.
So, how many jobs has Kimmel created?