Tesla CEO Elon Musk has reportedly donated 11.5 million shares, or about $2 billion, in Tesla shares to charity as a “bona fide gift,” as described in a US regulatory filing. It is unclear where he donated the shares, but it is assumed to be to his own, The Musk Foundation.
According to the SEC filing, Musk donated the shares between August and December 2022. They equated to about 1.6% of Musk’s total Tesla shares and are now worth around $2.4 billion after Tesla’s stock recovery from a tumultuous 2022.
Musk, who is frequently found atop the world’s richest people, currently has a net worth of $198.2 billion, according to Forbes’ real-time billionaire tracker. Bernard Arnault, CEO of LVMH, tops the list with a mind-numbing $213.4 billion, $15 billion more than Musk.
The Musk Foundation, Elon Musk’s Charity
This is not the first time Musk has leveraged his massive wealth for good. In 2021, he donated $5.74 billion worth of shares, per a regulatory filing, to The Musk Foundation. That same year in January, he announced that he would donate $100 million to a person or company that develops the best carbon capture technology.
His $5.7 billion instantly made The Musk Foundation one of the largest in the United States, according to Fortune. During this period, Musk donated $55 million to the Memphis-based St Jude Children’s Research Hospital and another $54 million to the X Prize Foundation, which he partnered with to fund the carbon capture and removal projects.
Largest Donation in 2022
According to Chronicle of Philanthropy, which was completed last year before Musk’s SEC filings, Microsoft founder Bill Gates landed at the No. 1 spot with a whopping $5.1 billion in donations. Michael Bloomberg’s $1.7 billion garnered him the No. 2 spot.
New Twitter CEO
Recently, Musk said that he was looking for someone to replace him as the CEO of Twitter, his newly acquired social media platform. With Musk’s workload being quite significant, he’s looking to appoint a new CEO by the end of 2023 so he can step-down and focus on other things. He even considered hiring philanthropist and YouTube star MrBeast as Twitter’s CEO.
“I think I need to stabilize the organization and just make sure it’s in a financially healthy place and that the product roadmap is clearly laid out,” Musk said at the World Government Summit in Dubai. “I’m guessing probably towards the end of this year should be good timing to find someone else to run the company because I think it should be in a stable position around the end of this year.”
