Musk's $5.7-B Mystery Donation Revealed: His Own Foundation

The mystery recipient of a $5.7 billion donation Elon Musk made in 2021 has been revealed. The money went to Musk’s own charitable foundation, Bloomberg reported late on Dec. 16, 2022, citing a tax filing obtained by the outlet.

Photo Insert: The Musk Foundation’s largest donations last year, according to Bloomberg, were $55 million to St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital and $54 million to the X Prize Foundation.

Musk gifted more than 5 million shares of Tesla to a charitable organization in November 2021. An SEC filing said the donation went “to charity,” but didn’t indicate which group received the money.

According to Bloomberg, it ended up at the Musk Foundation, a private charitable foundation that Musk created in 2002, Leslie Albrecht also reported for CBS MarketWatch.

The Musk Foundation’s largest donations last year, according to Bloomberg, were $55 million to St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital and $54 million to the X Prize Foundation, which is involved with a competition Musk launched to give a $100 million prize to a team that comes up with a solution for permanently removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

Musk, who lost his spot as the world’s richest person Dec. 13 following Tesla’s share price decline, has an estimated net worth of $177.5 billion. In 2012, Musk signed the Giving Pledge, a public promise to give away most of his wealth either during his lifetime or in his will.

While some billionaires announce their giving on social media or in other public forums, Musk is comparatively quiet about his charity, though he occasionally tweets about his donations.

He got into a public spat with the director of the United Nations World Food Program (WFP) in 2021, saying he would donate $6 billion to fight hunger if the WFP could “describe on this Twitter thread exactly how $6B will solve world hunger.”

That was just weeks before Musk’s $5.7 billion stock donation to charity, prompting some to speculate that Musk may have given the billions to the anti-hunger group. That was not the case. The World Food Program did not receive any donation from Musk, a WFP spokesman told MarketWatch this week.

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