Elon Musk Donated Nearly $6 Billion To Charity In November 2021, Filings Reveal

Elon Musk donated 5,044,000 shares of Tesla to charity from November 19th to November 29th of 2021, new filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission show. It marks one of the largest charitable donations in history. 

The massive $5.74 billion donation went to an unnamed charity, multiple media sources reported on Tuesday morning. It occurred around the same time Musk traded jabs with the United Nations about whether or not $6 billion would help solve world hunger. 

Musk said last year he would donate $6 billion to fight world hunger…if the UN could prove that much money would save tens of millions of lives. Musk was responding to director of the UN’s World Food Programme, who told CNN last year that $6 billion from people like Musk and Jeff Bezos could “help 42 million people” who he said “were literally going to die if we don’t reach them”. 

In a Tweet response, Musk challenged the UN’s statement, saying that if the World Food Programme could provide him “open sourced accounting” on how the $6 billion would be used, he would sell Tesla stock “right now and do it”.

Recall, Musk also sold more than $16 billion in stock late last year after posting a Twitter poll asking his followers if he should sell stock in the company. Musk claimed the sales were to help offset taxes that would amount to more than $11 billion due to stock options set to expire in 2022. 

Musk’s foundation, The Musk Foundation, has offered up large, eight-figure gifts in recent years, according to Bloomberg. 

Bob Lord, an associate fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies, told Reuters: “His tax benefit would be huge. He’d save between 40% and 50% of the $5.7 billion in tax, depending on whether he could take the deduction against his California income and he’d avoid the gains tax he would have to pay if he sold the stock.”