Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, challenged a United Nations official’s claim that just a small percentage of his wealth could help solve world hunger.
Musk was responding to comments by David Beasley, director of the UN’s World Food Programme, who repeated a call last week following an earlier tweet this month asking billionaires like Musk to “step up now, on a one-time basis.”
Beasley specifically called for action from Musk and Amazon.com Inc. co-founder Jeff Bezos, the two men atop the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
Just US$6 billion could keep 42 million people from dying, Beasley said.
If the World Food Programme, using transparent and open accounting, “can describe on this Twitter thread exactly how US$6B will solve world hunger, I will sell Tesla stock right now and do it,” Musk wrote in a Twitter post.
Musk is CEO of the electric-vehicle company, which last week joined the handful of companies valued at more than US$1 trillion.
The US$6 billion amount would be just a small fraction of Musk’s current net worth of US$311 billion -- and less than the US$9.3 billion his wealth increased on Oct. 29 alone, according to Bloomberg’s wealth index.
Tesla forms the vast majority of Musk’s net worth. He’s very rarely sold stock in the electric-vehicle maker, whose shares reached a record US$1,114 on Friday.
His fortune has also surged thanks to his stake in SpaceX, a private space-exploration company that was valued at about US$100 billion last month.
Musk, frequently outspoken on social media, has also been critical of attempts to tax U.S. billionaires.
He said on Twitter that a levy on billionaire wealth would only make a “small dent” toward paying off the national debt, arguing that the focus should be on government spending. Musk also said a billionaire tax would just be the start of taxing the merely wealthy.
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