IRS audits completed

As Elon Musk has tweeted more frequently, the IRS has completed fewer audits, a correlation that will delight conspiracy theorists and disappoint tax policy analysts in roughly equal measure. The coefficient is -0.912 across nine years, during which Musk's output grew from a few thousand tweets to what can only be described as an industrial quantity, while the IRS's ability to audit anyone declined with the steady inevitability of an agency that has been systematically defunded for a decade. One imagines a beleaguered IRS agent scrolling through Musk's feed instead of reviewing returns, which is almost certainly not what happened but captures the mood.

Musk's tweeting accelerated from about 2,000 posts per year in 2015 to over 15,000 by 2022, and far more after acquiring Twitter. IRS audits declined from about 1.2 million completed in 2015 to under 600,000 by 2023, a collapse driven by budget cuts that reduced the agency's enforcement staff by roughly 30 percent. Both trends are measuring different consequences of the same political era: the IRS was defunded by congressional Republicans who opposed tax enforcement, while Musk's growing social media presence tracked his transformation from tech CEO to political figure. The negative correlation is coincidental in mechanism but not in timing—both trends accelerated after 2018 and both are products of the same political economy.

Nine years of Musk tweeting more and the IRS auditing less is the kind of correlation that feels like it should be illegal, which is ironic given the auditing situation. Both trends are real, both are products of the same decade, and neither caused the other. The tweets accumulate, the audits decline, and the tax code remains unexamined.