A few weeks after becoming the world’s richest man, Elon Musk said he plans to donate US$100 million to reward the best “carbon capture” technology.
On January 21, Musk issued this statement on Twitter, his popular social platform, and said that more details will be announced in the following week.
Benefiting from the steady increase in the company’s profits, Tesla’s stock has attracted a large number of retail investors, and it has also been successfully selected for the S&P 500 Index. As the co-founder of Tesla, Musk’s net worth has grown substantially in the past year, surpassing Amazon’s CEO Jeff Bezos in one fell swoop.
According to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, the South African-born entrepreneur is currently worth US$2014 billion.
After learning that he became the world’s richest man, Musk just shrugged, and then began to solicit opinions on how to donate his assets.
Compared with those rich men he just surpassed on the “Bloomberg World 500 Richest List”, the 49-year-old Musk can only be regarded as a “novice” in the field of charity.
Although Musk also signed the “Giving Pledge” initiated by Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, from public information, his achievements in philanthropy are still relatively small. Quartz’s analysis shows that Musk has donated a total of more than US$257 million to the Musk Foundation, which is equivalent to 0.1% of his current net assets, while the Musk Foundation has donated from 2016 to 2018. Donated $65 million to approximately 200 non-profit organizations.
Musk is not the first person to solicit opinions on charitable causes through social media. Bezos initiated a solicitation of opinions from followers on Twitter on matters related to charitable donations in 2017.
Musk’s focus on “carbon capture” technology can be described as “the same line” as his interest in other commercial fields, and they are mainly technical solutions aimed at solving urgent environmental problems.
Carbon capture and carbon storage technologies are composed of many different technologies, with the goal of capturing and preventing carbon dioxide from being emitted into the atmosphere. With these technologies, we can capture carbon dioxide from the gas emitted by power plants, industrial enterprises, and even directly from the air.
There are currently more than 20 large-scale “carbon capture” plants in the world, capable of capturing approximately 40 million metric tons of carbon dioxide each year, accounting for approximately 0.1% of the total global emissions.
Musk once said that the purpose of his accumulation of wealth is to donate or at least use it for his passion, such as space exploration projects. In an interview with German publisher Axel Springer, Musk said: “Building a city on Mars requires a lot of resources. I hope I can make my greatest contribution to it.” (Fortune Chinese Network)
Translator: Liang Yu
Reviewer: Xia Lin
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