Italian tax authorities demand 12.5 million from Elon Musk's X

The Italian tax authorities are also hunting Elon Musk, the multi-billionaire entrepreneur of South African origin who became the right-hand man of the new American president Donald Trump. The Revenue Agency has in fact communicated to the former Twitter, which is now called “X” after being acquired by the Tesla tycoon, a “draft document” that anticipates a dispute of 12.5 million euros for an alleged VAT evasion in the period from 2016 to 2022. At the same time, the Milan prosecutor's office has opened an investigation into the hypothesis of tax fraud, as reported by Reuters .

The protests

The tax disputes raised against X are similar to those that led to Meta (owner of Facebook, Instagram, Whatsapp) being asked for approximately 880 million euros in evaded VAT based on an innovative tax theorem that is based on the exchange of data. The central point is the axiom that free subscriptions to online platforms in exchange for the transfer of personal data, which have an economic value since they allow user profiling, should be taxed as commercial transactions. The exchange between user data and use of social platforms would thus be considered an "exchange" between different goods that would give rise to VAT. An epochal change for this sector that until now has considered the data transferred by users to the platforms as completely free.

It is not clear how this tax dispute will end because both X and Meta are absolutely against accepting this approach of the Revenue Agency that would potentially have effects throughout Europe given that VAT is a tax under the EU regime. There is then a more specific issue in the case of X, owned by a politician very close to Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni. It must be said, on the other hand, that the Commission itself in an opinion considered it plausible to impose VAT on this particular exchange of data.