Elon Musk Donates $5.7 Billion of his Tesla Shares to Charity

Tesla CEO Elon Musk recently donated $5.7 billion in the electric vehicle company’s shares to charity.

Tesla’s donation of 5,044,000 shares came to light on Monday in a filing the company made to the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Tesla’s stock was worth over $1,000 per share at the time they were donated between November 19 and November 29 of last year.

This makes Musk one of the biggest donors in the US of last year, second only to Bill Gates and Melinda Gates’s foundation, which donated $15 billion last year.

Musk was famously challenged by the UN’s World Food Programme (WFP) to try to use his wealth to solve world hunger.

“If WFP can describe on this Twitter Thread exactly how $6 billion will solve world hunger, I will sell Tesla stock right now and do it,” Musk published on his Twitter last October, only one month before Tesla made its donations.

“There are millions of people around the world on the brink of starvation. Whether WFP receives any of this money is yet to be seen, but I am excited to hear that Elon is engaged. This is an amazing and great first step,” said David Beasley, the executive director of WFP, in a statement.

Putting Elon Musk’s astounding wealth into perspective

Elon Musk’s personal net worth is currently larger than Greece’s gross domestic product (GDP). The businessman and engineer who is the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX is worth $242.2 billion, while the nation of Greece’s GDP is $189.4 billion.

For a single individual to be worth more than any developed country is astounding, but to be worth more than contemporary Greece is no small feat.

Greece is classified by the International Monetary Fund as an advanced, high-income economy, with its economy split between service (80%), industrial sectors (16%), and agriculture (4%). It is currently the sixteenth-largest economy in the European Union, which has a total of 27 members.

To put Musk’s monumental economic weight even more into perspective, Greece’s economy is also extraordinarily fast-growing, with the IMF also announcing last week that the nation’s economy is looking at a growth rate of 6.5% by the end of 2021.

The IMF detailed the country’s growth for 2021 in their global economic outlook report, where they also projected that Greece’s economy would grow by 4.6% in 2022.

The Fund predicts that the inflation rate will reach 1.3% by the end of the year and then drop down to 0.4% by 2022. They project that the unemployment rate will drop to 15.8% in 2021 and further down to 14.6% next year, both years down from 16.4% in 2020.

But the entire country of Greece seems to be outpaced by the profits Musk has made from his electric car and space exploration ventures, and some analysts are even predicting that the latter could make him the first trillionaire in history.