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Jeff Bezos has offered to send Donald Trump to space after the GOP candidate alleged that Amazon was tax dodging.
On Monday, hours before he made one of his most controversial speeches yet in which he explained his latest policy pledge to ban all Muslims entering the US, Mr Trump fired a series of tweets to Mr Bezos, the CEO of Amazon who is also the owner of the Washington Post.
The first one alleged Mr Bezos owns the newspaper title as a “tax shelter” to keep taxes down on Amazon.
Calling it the “Washington Post scam”, Mr Trump wrote that Mr Bezos “screws [the] public”.
However, before Mr Bezos had a chance to hit back, a number of financial experts shot down Trump’s theory.
Many experts pointed to the fact that Mr Bezos is personally the owner of the Washington Post, not Amazon, so the two companies' taxes would not be intertwined.
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The former chairman of Barack Obama's Council of Economic Advisors wrote that Trump’s tweets were “one of the dumbest things said about economics this week”, while others were confused and wrote that the claims don’t even make sense, reports Business Insider.
Instead of using economics to try and disprove Mr Trump’s allegations, Mr Bezos thought of a different way and offered to send the GOP candidate to space, even creating the hashtag #SendDonaldtospace.
Mr Bezos, who is estimated to be worth $59 billion, has actually got the mechanisms to do such a thing as he also owns Blue Origin, a space travel company which is expected to send passengers into space in 2017.
We will have to wait and see if Mr Bezos stays true to his word in two years time.
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