Tesla CEO Elon Musk hit back at MSNBC's host Joy Reid for railing against him over his Twitter bickering with Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass.
Musk went on Twitter to brand the cable television host “a lobbyist for Sen Karen" on Thursday for her defence of the Democratic senator.
A day earlier, Reid had lashed out at Musk, calling him a freeloader, selfish and disrespectful, while accusing him of “misappropriating Black vernacular for misogynistic purposes”.
"Elon Musk is the absolute worst," Reid told viewers in her regular segment in the "Reidout". The senator herself then joined the host to respond to the billionaire's “Senator Karen” tweet aimed at her after she had blasted the newly-declared Time magazine's "Person of the Year" as a freeloader”.
Warren, who has been advocating raising taxes on the richest Americans' assets, rather than just their income, had tweeted on Monday that the SpaceX founder had take advantage of the US “rigged” tax code to dodge payments.
The politician had also referenced a report by ProPublica, published in June, revealing that several US billionaires, such as Amazon co-founder Jeff Bezos, business magnate Warren Buffett, and Elon Musk paid little to no taxes.
In reply, Musk, who is worth an estimated $251 billion, according to Forbes' Real Time Billionaires estimate, quipped back on Twitter, “Stop projecting.”
He linked his post to a Fox News opinion piece accusing Warren, who is white, of not being truthful about having Native American heritage.
As Musk tweeted that Warren reminded him of “my friend's angry Mom would just randomly yell at everyone for no reason”, he resorted to a pejorative slang term used to describe middle-aged white women, often racist.
“Please don't call the manager on me, Senator Karen,” wrote Elon Musk.
The eccentric billionaire also pointed out to Warren that he would “pay more taxes than any American in history this year".
After this exchange, Warren had joined the MSNBC host to reiterate her insistence that Musk, “the world’s richest freeloader” had “a very thin skin".
"But you know the part that makes me angry about this? It’s on behalf of every public schoolteacher, every waitress, every computer programmer, every street cleaner who actually paid taxes and that means they paid more than Elon Musk did in federal income taxes. And that’s just not right. And it means the system is broken," fumed Warren.
Elon Musk, according to Forbes, is estimated to owe the federal government at least $8.3 billion for 2021, based on his stock sales of nearly $13 billion through 13 December.