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Elon Musk, by far the richest man on the planet, has poured tens of millions of dollars into the effort to elect Donald Trump. In addition to invaluable promotion of Trump’s message (in-kind donations, if any) at He reportedly donated $50 million. And then there’s the legally questionable $100 payment and $1 million lottery-style giveaway he’s offering to registered voters in battleground states who sign a petition that reads:
The First and Second Amendments guarantee freedom of speech and the right to bear arms. By signing below, I pledge my support for the First and Second Amendments.
Strange, right? But if Mr. Trump wins and gives more power to the very government that Musk’s companies have grown to profitability and continue to rely on, the return on his investment could be huge. There is. Also, remember that tens of millions to this guy is pennies to the rest of us. Here’s how much of Musk’s $50 million net worth.
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But what about his philanthropy? Didn’t Musk sign Bill Gates’ Giving Pledge, pledging to donate at least half of his wealth to charity?
Yes, he signed up in 2012 for what it’s worth. But he is behind on his donations. Consider that in all of 2022, he donated $160.5 million to charity, according to his foundation’s most recent tax returns. Mr. Musk accomplished more than that yesterday — much more.
forbes real time millionaires
That’s right, Mr. Musk’s net worth increased by $2.7 billion on Friday, according to Forbes’ Real-Time Billionaires. This database serves as a useful reminder of the extent to which America’s supposed egalitarian experiment devolved into a plutocracy, or even an oligarchy. Founder John Adams hoped we could avoid this situation (though he wasn’t so sure we could).
To put it another way, Musk donates as much money to charity in a year as he makes in a day.
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6 percent! Incidentally, Mr. Musk is now roughly 100 times richer than when he signed the pledge, a scenario Andrew Carnegie would have considered grotesque. He should start acting more like Mackenzie Scott. Because as a trusted advisor to businessman John D. Rockefeller, he once warned his boss:
It needs to be distributed faster than it can grow. If you don’t, you and your children and your children’s children will be crushed.
Now, Musk donated about $2.3 billion in Tesla stock to his foundation in 2022, getting a hefty tax break and securing huge tax-free capital gains at the expense of American taxpayers. But our rules governing charity are so inflexible that he only has to spend a fraction of these “charitable” assets. The foundation’s nest egg (approximately $7.2 billion at the end of 2022) generated $309 million in investment income that year, and the value of unsold assets increased by at least $373 million. Still, the amount donated to charity was about the same as last year.
Federal law requires private foundations to set aside 5% of their assets (including expenses) each year. Musk’s 2022 obligation was about $358 million, but he paid less than half of that. The government has allowed foundations to average their spending over five years, but he will have to significantly pick up the pace.
I may not have expected the Musk Foundation’s tax documents to reveal the nefarious purposes he may have donated to, but I’m disappointed. His public giving is beyond dispute. However, what you need to be careful about is transferring money to a donor-recommended fund. His foundation has transferred more than $75 million to Fidelity Charitable’s endowment since 2018. For inexplicable reasons, the government allows such transfers to count toward foundations’ mandatory charitable payments.
Donor-sponsored funds are even more problematic than private foundations, but both cost taxpayers a lot of money and, as I explain in my must-read book on the American oligarchy, are highly undemocratic. Not only are creators not required to donate a minimum amount of assets each year, they are also not required to reveal where their donations go. In other words, it’s dark money — convenient for people who want to secretly donate money to odious nonprofits, including groups that seek to subvert the democratic process if it helps put a particular candidate back in the White House. It’s good.
