Elon Musk at the weekend asked Twitter users to decide whether he should sell more than $20bn worth of his Tesla shares and pay tax — and the online crowd responded with a resounding “yes”.

Musk’s apparent willingness to cash in a tenth of his stock and incur a tax bill of more than $4bn based on the will of the Twittersphere follows a proposal in the US that billionaires should pay tax on their unrealised capital gain. He warned last month that any new tax would one day be extended to the middle classes, tweeting: “Eventually, they run out of other people’s money and then they come for you,” he tweeted.

Leaving it to the crowd to decide whether he should make his first large-scale sale of Tesla stock was the kind of stunt that has delighted Musk’s fans and made him the most widely followed business leader on Twitter, with 62.7m followers, while needling his many critics.