Elon Musk, Tesla’s CEO and currently the richest man in the world, announced Thursday night that he would give $ 100 million, about five hundredths of his net worth, to a prize to reward the best carbon capture technology.
“I’m donating $ 100 million to the award for best carbon capture technology”, Musk tweeted. “Details next week.”
Musk’s spokesmen did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
It would be his biggest known contribution to date and represents about 0.05% of his net worth, largely derived from his holdings in Tesla shares, the value of which has skyrocketed since 2020.
In 2012, Musk became one of the billionaires in the world to sign “The Giving Pledge”, promising to donate half of his fortune to charities during his lifetime or in will. At the time, its net worth was about $ 2 billion. It is now estimated at about $ 183 billion.
So far, the pace of his donations has not kept up with his exorbitant net worth. In September, Forbes reported that Musk had given about $ 25 million to nonprofit groups and transferred tens of millions of dollars to donor funds, which had disbursed about $ 75 million in donations over his lifetime.
In the past, industrialists like Rockefeller and Carnegie reaped fabulous wealth before turning to philanthropic works later in life.
Nowadays, some of the richest people in the world seem to have more trouble sharing their wealth for charity. When pressed, the new generation of the wealthy says it wants to ensure that resources are used for the greatest and most enduring human good.
Outside of work, Jeff Bezos, CEO and founder of Amazon, put more of his fortune into space exploration through his rocket company than trying to help solve problems on Earth.
“We humans have to go into space if we want to continue to have a thriving civilization,” said Bezos in 2019. “We are in the process of destroying this planet.” Bezos did not sign “The Giving Pledge”.
Even so, in 2020, he still topped the Chronicle of Philanthropy’s annual list of donations with a $ 10 billion gift to the newly launched Bezos Earth Fund to tackle climate change. He also founded the Day One Families fund, giving homeless charities $ 2 billion and few restrictions on how they are spent, a rarity among high net worth individuals.
The fund started 15 months after he tweeted in 2017 a “request for ideas” about what to do with his wealth, just before he momentarily became the richest person in the world.
This indecision is not shared by the novelist MacKenzie Scott, ex-married to Bezos, who donated more than $ 4 billion in 2020 to hundreds of charities helping people affected by the pandemic’s economic crisis. She also donated to nonprofit organizations with a focus on social and racial justice 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 the assistant principal under secretary for fossil energy at the Department of United States Energy.
