Elon Musk Gives UN Conditions For $6 Billion Donation To Solve World Hunger
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Elon Musk says he’ll sell Tesla stock to help raise $6 billion the UN says it needs to solve world hunger, if they can prove how the money will be spent.
Director of the UN’s World Food Programme (WFP), David Beasley, has called upon the help of billionaires to solve the world hunger crisis.
Beasley said 42 million people could be aided by a $6 billion donation; people who are ‘literally going to die if we don’t reach them’.
Musk, who is currently the world’s richest man, has since spoken out and said he will help. However, it’s on the condition that the UN publicly show how the money will be spent.
The Tesla CEO said he will sell part of his stock – at present, Musk has a net worth of almost $300 billion, according to Forbes‘ Billionaires Index – the $6 billion the UN needs would be roughly 2% of Musk’s wealth.
The figure of $6 billion was first mentioned when Beasley went on CNN‘s Connect the World last week, saying billionaires need to ‘step up now, on a one-time basis’. ‘$6 billion to help 42 million people that are literally going to die if we don’t reach them. It’s not complicated,’ he said.
However, Musk took to Twitter to question how the money would be spent to solve the crisis,
He said:
If WFP can describe on this Twitter thread exactly how $6B will solve world hunger, I will sell Tesla stock right now and do it.
Musk also asked for the ‘precise’ details to ‘be open source accounting, so the public sees precisely how the money is spent’.
Beasley responded to Musk to ‘assure’ him of having ‘systems in place for transparency and open source accounting’ and said Musk and the WFP could work together, so that he was ‘totally confident of such’.
In a followup tweet, Beasley said the CNN headline was ‘not accurate’, adding: ‘$6B will not solve world hunger, but it WILL prevent geopolitical instability, mass migration and save 42 million people on the brink of starvation. An unprecedented crisis and a perfect storm due to Covid/conflict/climate crises.’
Beasley has previously spoken out about how the ‘world needs to wake up’, calling on all billionaires to contribute and stop a ‘global humanitarian crisis […] that is spiralling out of control’.
Beasley told CNN he has asked billionaires ‘to do this every day, every week, every year’.
He said there was a net-worth increase of ‘$1.8 trillion in the past year’ for the ‘top 400 billionaires in the United States’, and that ‘all [he’s] asking for is 0.36% of your net-worth increase’.
If Musk did donate $6 billion, he would still be the richest man in the world, with around $100 billion more than Jeff Bezos.
Beasley concluded: ‘I’m for people making money, but God knows I’m all for helping people who are in great need right now. The world is in trouble.’
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