Elon Musk to donate slice of net worth for carbon capture



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Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla and current richest man in the world, announced Thursday evening that he would donate $ 100 million, or about five hundredths of his net worth, for an award for best carbon capture technology.

“I’m donating $ 100 million for a best carbon capture technology award,” Musk tweeted. “Details next week.”

Musk spokespersons did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

It would be his largest known contribution to date and would represent around 0.05% of his net worth, largely coming from his holdings of Tesla shares, whose value has skyrocketed since 2020.

In 2012, Musk became one of the world’s billionaires to sign “The Giving Pledge,” promising to donate half of their fortune to charity while they are alive or in their wills. At the time, his net worth was around $ 2 billion. Now it is estimated to be around $ 183 billion.

So far, the pace of his giving has not kept pace with his net worth skyrocketing. In September, Forbes reported that Musk had given around $ 25 million to nonprofit groups and transferred tens of millions of dollars to donor-advised funds, which had disbursed around $ 75 million in grants over the course of of his life.

In the past, industrialists like Rockefeller and Carnegie reaped fabulous wealth before turning to philanthropic endeavors later in life.

These days, some of the richest people in the world seem to have a harder time parting with their wealth for charitable efforts. When in a hurry, the new breed of wealthy say they want to make sure resources are harnessed for the greatest and most long-term human good.

Outside of work, Jeff Bezos, CEO and founder of Amazon, has invested more of his fortune into space exploration through his rocket company than trying to help solve problems on Earth. .

“We humans have to go to space if we are to continue to have a thriving civilization,” Bezos said in 2019. “We are destroying this planet.” Bezos did not sign “The Giving Pledge”.

Yet in 2020, he still topped the Chronicle of Philanthropy’s annual donation list with a $ 10 billion donation to the new Bezos Earth Fund in an effort to fight climate change. He also started the Day One Families fund, offering homeless charities $ 2 billion and few terms related to how it is spent, a rarity among wealthy people.

The fund was launched 15 months after tweeting in 2017 a “request for ideas” about what to do with your wealth shortly before momentarily becoming the richest person in the world.

This indecision is not shared by novelist MacKenzie Scott, formerly married to Bezos, who gave more than $ 4 billion in 2020 to hundreds of charities helping those affected by the economic crises of the pandemic. She has also donated to social and racial justice nonprofits and historically black colleges and universities.

Musk’s announcement came on the same day that the Biden administration appointed Jennifer Wilcox, a carbon capture expert and professor of engineering and energy policy at the University of Pennsylvania, Musk’s alma mater, as senior assistant secretary for fossil fuel at the US Department of Energy.



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