The charities to which Tesla chief executive Elon Musk has donated more than 5 million shares of his company remain a mystery.
Musk gave away the stock in November 2021 in five separate transactions, according to a filing to the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).
The donations were worth about $5.7 billion at the time they were made, but are now valued at around $4.4 billion following a pullback in shares of the electric car company.
The transactions came as Musk was selling a huge quantity of Tesla shares granted to him as compensation. Musk’s stock sales were expected to generate a large tax bill that charitable donations could help to mitigate.
When the filing first hit, some speculated that Musk had made a massive gift to the United Nations’ World Food Programme (WFP).
In October 2021, Musk wrote on Twitter that he would donate $6 billion to the WFP if the organisation could describe “exactly how” the money would “solve world hunger”.
But the WFP told Forbes it not has received such a gift. “Whether WFP receives any of this money is yet to be seen, but I am excited to hear that Elon is engaged,” said the programme’s executive director, David Beasley, in a statement.
No other charities have announced gifts yet, either, Forbes said.
In 2021, Musk financed a $100 million competition for projects to fight climate change in a spree of donating.
Last year, Musk also committed $30 million to nonprofits in the Rio Grande Valley in South Texas, $5 million to Khan Academy, a platform for online courses, $5 million to a pair of Boston researchers studying coronavirus and $1 million to Feeding Texas, which operates food banks.
Almost all the recipients have been primarily working with Igor Kurganov, a professional poker player turned philanthropist, whom Musk has enlisted to keep track of proposals.
Musk sold more than $16 billion worth of Tesla shares in late 2021, according to the Wall Street Journal, after saying on Twitter that he expected to pay $11 billion in taxes last year.
His fortune is estimated at $238 billion by Forbes, and Musk in 2012 signed the “Giving Pledge,” launched by Warren Buffett and Bill Gates and encourages the rich to contribute a majority of their wealth to philanthropic causes.
- AFP, with additional editing by George Russell
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