Most people don’t like billionaire Elon Musk. According to the latest polling, 53% of Americans have an unfavorable opinion of the billionaire, while just 39% hold a favorable view. The Economist pointed out this fact in an absolutely wild sit-down interview last week that went viral. Musk appeared defensive and desperate to prove people actually love him, pointing to his large follower count on X, the social media site he controls.
The hate for Musk probably has something to do with his destruction of USAID, his steady stream of racist tweets, and his refusal to accept responsibility for the people who died as a result of his actions in government. And who can forget those two Nazi-style salutes he gave in public? The hate is also likely related to his attitude about charity. Musk has argued that his private businesses are a form of charitable giving and that billionaires like himself shouldn’t bother giving money away.
Why does Musk not believe in charity? Recently, he’s started to insist that it’s because people won’t actually need money in the future.
“Money won’t matter in 2036,” Musk insisted in an interview with the editor-in-chief of the Economist, Zanny Minton Beddoes.
Beddoes laughed off Musk’s assertion, pointing out that SpaceX investors probably believe that money will still matter in ten years. But Musk claims that AI will exceed human intelligence in five years and humans will no longer be in charge of the world by 2036. And at that point, he claims a techno-utopian society will emerge where no one will need money because robots will do all the labor and produce a world of abundance.
It’s absurd, of course. Labor-saving technologies are great, but they don’t change how a political or economic system is set up. If you want to pay people to stay at home, you could do that today in some fashion through government actions. There would be massive trade-offs, especially if the promise was a leisure society of little or no work. But it’s a political problem, not a technological one. And Musk proved through his actions with DOGE that he loathes people who he believes don’t work for the money they’re given. He was constantly complaining about people who he believed were getting government money without contributing through labor. The only thing that’s changed is that he’s selling you on the idea that his robots will do everything.
Musk has been crashing out for days over criticism about what he said in that interview last week. He promoted blog posts from his fanboys, he referred to chef José Andrés as an asshole; he said liberal commentator Joy Reid is a man and suggested she must be getting talking points from some unseen entity; and he called the Economist editor a “traitor to the west” and implied with an image that she should be shot.
All of which brings us to his tweet on Monday where he was asked to put his money where his mouth is. Daron Acemoğlu, a professor at MIT and 2024 recipient of the Nobel Memorial Prize in economics, suggested that Musk pledge to donate about all of his current wealth, about $1 trillion, to charity no later than 2036.
“This would establish with great credibility your belief in the powers of AI and technology,” wrote Acemoğlu. “It would also assuage many people around the world who are worried about the political and social influence of billionaires and trillionaires.”
Acemoğlu added that the charities should be “approved as effective and non-ideological by an impartial body.”
Musk responded to the tweet by claiming, “I am actually going to do something along these lines!” It’s unclear what that means exactly. But if Musk actually plans to give away all his wealth, that would indeed be noteworthy. Consider us skeptical.
Musk has given money to his own foundation over the years, but the Musk Foundation is little more than a joke. Filings show the Musk Foundation gave out $474 million in 2024 but the vast majority of that went to a nonprofit that operates a school for his employees in Texas, according to the New York Times. If your charitable giving is just something that benefits your business, it’s not really charity.
The most interesting question might be how much money Musk could donate in order to see his approval ratings improve. Would society look at him differently if he actually donated substantial sums to charity? It’s entirely possible that his reputation is so incurably radioactive that his polling numbers wouldn’t budge. But you have to believe that giving away every penny he holds would do something for his likability.
Unfortunately, it seems like we’ll never get to see this experiment play out in real life. Musk could give away hundreds of billions of dollars and he would still have more money than entire countries. And we’ve already seen what he spends his money on.
Musk is currently worth about $715 billion, according to Forbes, well off the $1.4 trillion peak he saw shortly after the SpaceX IPO. And if he’s serious about giving away billions of dollars, that’s not necessarily a bad thing. But it all depends on where the money goes. He spent almost $300 million to help elected Republicans and Donald Trump in 2024. And if we had to bet, this guy isn’t going to give away money to orphans, widows, and starving people.
The head of the UN world food program asked Musk to donate $6.6 billion to feed hungry people in 2021. Musk declined and instead gave money to his own foundation. Whatever he’s cooking up, it’s not going to benefit the poor and the vulnerable.
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