Elon Musk’s Irish Tax Scam

In 2019 Twitter/X’s Irish division was given close to €8 billion worth of Intellectual Property assets. The Irish division could then count that as a cost they could claim against tax - even though it’s their own asset!

They then engaged in an accounting procedure called “amortisation” - which means you spread the cost of the asset over it’s supposed lifetime. By doing this X was able to claim a portion of the €8 billion against tax payments every year.

This trick has allowed them to steal €244 million in tax since 2019 alone.

They’re not the only corporation getting in on this scam though - Workday have moved €5 billion in “intangible assets” into Ireland gaining them a €14 million tax credit, while Oracle have moved €12.5 billion into the country.

In 2023 there was €341.96 billion in “intanglible assets” invested in Ireland. This country is a tax haven. In 7 years the book value of intangibles held by Irish firms has nearly tripled — from $386 billion to $967 billion.

So since 2015 a trillion of such assets has been moved to Ireland. This was the year the “double Irish” tax scam was stopped. That scam saw companies set up two Irish companies - one resident in Ireland, the other in a tax haven like Bermuda.

The Irish firm in Ireland would hold the IP while the tax haven one would hold the licensing rights. The tax haven one would then collect fees from their operations in Ireland and other parts of the world while transfering as much costs as it could - called “transfer pricing” - to the tax haven.

The government were forced to close down these tax loopholes but allow the rich to find other ways to abuse tax. The capitalists hire teams of accountants to hide as much money as possible so they don’t have to contribute to public services, housing or hospitals.

In 2024, Ireland collected €28 billion in corporate tax - you’d be surprised as it’s not as if they’ve spent that, or the Apple billions, on housing or healthcare. They’d rather not up supply of housing as they don’t want to hit the profits of vultures, developers and landlords.

There is a growing gap between GNP (a measure of the economic activity of companies in Ireland excluding multinationals) and GDP (which includes multinationals) - that gap is now €200 billion.

Irish capitalism is a house of cards. The establishment parties have long argued that taxing corporations would make them up and leave. They’ll leave anyway if they smell a higher profit to be made somewhere else. The tax haven model has left us vunerable.

But how else can the Irish capitalist class slot into a global economy run by corporate giants? They’ll never break from subordination to the big players because it’s not in their class interests to break. The same goes for their political puppets in Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael.

Only the working class can provide a real alternative if we fight to put our class in the driving seat of a socialist planned economy where the wealth we create is under democratic control and where the economy is shaped by a sustainable model of production for the people.

We either wait to suffer the pain that’s coming when the tax haven house of cards inevitably collapses - or we fight to overthrow a system that doesn’t work for our class.