#Bernie Sanders clashes with Elon Musk over massive fortune

Elon Musk says he’s hoarding wealth for a good cause — but it’s not good enough for Sen. Bernie Sanders.

The left-wing lawmaker targeted the billionaire Tesla CEO after Musk claimed he would use his giant fortune to support life on other planets.

Sanders — a Vermont independent who’s a figurehead of the Democratic Party’s left flank — first went after Musk last week by pointing out the massive wealth disparity that he and fellow billionaire Jeff Bezos exemplify.

“We are in a moment in American history where two guys — Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos — own more wealth than the bottom 40 [percent] of people in this country,” Sanders tweeted on March 18. “That level of greed and inequality is not only immoral. It is unsustainable.”

The website CleanTechnica — which frequently covers Tesla — took umbrage with Sanders’ comments in an article calling criticisms of Musk over his wealth “ridiculous.”

Musk offered his own defense in response to the article on Twitter, saying his fortune will go toward his spacefaring ambitions. His rocket-building company, SpaceX, wants to land humans on Mars by 2026.

“I am accumulating resources to help make life multiplanetary & extend the light of consciousness to the stars,” Musk tweeted early Sunday morning.

But that didn’t satisfy Sanders, who introduced a proposal last week to hike corporate taxes on companies that pay top executives at least 50 times more than their median worker’s pay.

“Space travel is an exciting idea, but right now we need to focus on Earth and create a progressive tax system so that children don’t go hungry, people are not homeless and all Americans have healthcare,” Sanders said in response to Musk’s tweet. “The level of inequality in America is obscene and a threat to our democracy.”

Sanders also called out Musk last August when he proposed taxing 60 percent of the wealth that American billionaires gained during the coronavirus pandemic.

Musk was worth less than $30 billion at the start of 2020 before his electric-car maker’s stock price exploded, giving him a net worth of $170 billion as of Sunday, according to Bloomberg’s Billionaires Index.

Bezos — the Amazon CEO whose $181 billion fortune is the only one to outrank Musk’s — had not responded to Sanders’ latest criticism online by Monday morning.