Even though he might average over 50 posts a day on a variety of topics, including conspiracy theories about anti-white genocide and Space X’s latest rocket failure, for Elon Musk getting involved in a debate a Dutch tax reform is a unique situation. In response to an offensive post describing the proposed changes as “r******d”, Musk posted the 100 emoji -such is the level of 2026 political discourse. And by doing so, the billionaire exposed a fault line between the increasing tech oligarchy and societies willing to use the state to curb their power.
The reform in question involved the Wet werkelijk rendement box 3, or simply Box 3 law. The proposed changes swap thecurrent system – which taxes a fictional return on your savings and investments, whether you actually earned it or not – forone that taxes your actual gains, at around 36%. For most assets, that means an annual reckoning on paper profits: if your shares rise in value this year, you owe tax on the rise this year, whether you actually cashed in these profits or not. Property and startup shares get a gentler version, with profits taxed only when you actually cash out, since nobody can sell a slice of their living room to cover a tax bill. In simple terms, if you own stocks or crypto assets for example, and across a financial year those assets increase in value, you will pay tax on that increase.
That’s the future facing investors and equity-paid employees in the Netherlands, and it’s why some of the country’s best-known tech companies are warning it could push their staff abroad. A coalition of roughly twenty Netherlands-based companies – including Adyen, Booking.com, Bunq, CM.com, Picnic, TomTom, Uber and Prosus – has asked the government to tax shares only when they’re sold. Tech firms routinely pay staff partly in equity, often stock that’s illiquidor locked up for years, with nowhere to sell it even if you wanted to. The softer, sell-only exemption applies only to startups, not companies the size of Booking or Adyen, so their employees get the harsher treatment by default. CM.com’s Jeroen van Glabbeek, now the coalition’s de facto spokesman, put it to newspaper De Telegraaf as plainly as it can be put: ‘You’ll pay tax on money you don’t have yet.’
It’s not just a tech gripe. Peer Swinkels, who runs the family-owned Royal Swinkels brewing group, has thrown his weight behind the complaint too, arguing the bill hits small shareholders everywhere, not only in Silicon Valley-on-the-IJ. And Prosus’ head of strategy, Sebastiaan Vaessen, told Accountancy Vanmorgen that young specialists are alreadychoosing London over Amsterdam – inconveniently just as Prosus tries to build an AI team here.
Politically, the bill isn’t having an easy ride either. It cleared the Tweede Kamer, but on 30 June, the Eerste Kamer (Senate) postponed its vote, sending the cabinet away to rework it before Budget Day in September. Even a party inside the governing coalition isn’t fully on board: CDA senator Janny Bakker-Klein says taxing people on money that doesn’texist ‘feels unfair to people’.
State secretary Folkert Eerenberg has promised to lay out, before the Senate reconvenes, how the country might move toward taxing gains only when they’re realised – which is all the tech coalition wanted in the first place. Two fixes are apparently on the table: letting losses offset future gains, and widening the exemption to cover any company paying staffin shares, big or small.
It’s not just Musk that has got involved: that bastion of social equality Prince Constantijn suggested the damage to the country’s reputation as a place to build a career is done regardless of how the final law reads. For now, nothing has actually changed: the bill sits contested, unfinished, and very much still just an idea rather than a tax bill in anyone’sactual mailbox.
Written by James Turrell