Elon Musk, The Times Person of the Year 2021, donated nearly $6 billion worth of Tesla shares to charity last year, making him America’s biggest philanthropist after Bill Gates and his ex-wife Melinda French Gates.
Elon Musk gave a total of 5,044,000 shares in the world’s most valuable carmaker to unnamed charities over a ten-day period in November, according to a filing with America’s financial regulator.
It came as the billionaire sold $16.4bn worth of shares after polling Twitter users about offloading 10% of his stake in the electric-car maker in early November.
He said on Twitter that he would pay more than $11bn in taxes in 2021 due to his exercise of stock options set to expire this year.
Musk’s public philanthropy gestures have so far trailed other billionaires’. Musk and the Amazon founder, Jeff Bezos, have donated less than 1% of their net worth, whereas Warren Buffett and George Soros had given away more than 20% by early September, according to the business magazine Forbes.
Musk is president of the Musk Foundation, offering grants for the “development of safe artificial intelligence to benefit humanity” among other causes, according to its website.
Last year, Musk and the foundation offered $100m prizes to those who could come up with a technology to help remove carbon from the atmosphere.
Last year, he said he was donating $20m to schools in Cameron County, Texas, the location of a Space X rocket launch site, and $10m to the city of Brownsville. Musk has also flirted with more ambitious philanthropy goals.
On Twitter last year he said: “If [the United Nations World Food Programme] can describe … exactly how $6 billion will solve world hunger, I will sell Tesla stock right now and do it.”
He was responding to a plea for a donation from David Beasley, the executive director of the World Food Programme.
In January last year, he asked Twitter users about “ways to donate money that really make a difference (way harder than it seems)”.
