10 h 5 m, 10 dez 2021 ano - NEW YORK TIMES Elon Musk’s Latest Innovation Troll Philanthropy

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FROM THE NEW YORK TIMES:

Elon Musk’s Latest Innovation: Troll Philanthropy

Some very wealthy people give their money away in an attempt to burnish their reputations. Not the Tesla C.E.O.

By Nicholas Kulish

The richest people on earth typically devote a share of their vast resources to charity. That is the bargain and the expectation, anyway.
Jeff Bezos, until very recently the world’s richest human, has been applying himself dutifully if a bit cautiously to the task, giving money to food banks and homeless families while pledging $10 billion of the fortune he earned through the online retailer Amazon to fight climate change.

The latest richest human, Elon Musk, has taken a rather different tack. There was the public spat with the director of the World Food Programme on Twitter, for instance, announcing, “If WFP can describe on this Twitter thread exactly how $6B will solve world hunger, I will sell Tesla stock right now and do it.”

There was the online poll asking whether he should sell 10 percent of his Tesla shares in order to pay taxes on at least part of his wealth, like most people do without running a survey first. And, of course, there is the ongoing insistence that his moneymaking efforts, running both the electric carmaker Tesla and the rocket company SpaceX, are already bettering humankind, thank you very much.

Mr. Musk is practicing “troll philanthropy.”

That’s what Benjamin Soskis, senior research associate in the Center on Nonprofits and Philanthropy at the Urban Institute, has called it, noting that Mr. Musk seems to be having fun with this novel approach.

“He doesn’t seem to care much about using his philanthropy to curry public favor,” Mr. Soskis said. “In fact, he seems to enjoy using his identity as a philanthropist in part to antagonize the public.” Before this year, one estimate put his giving at $100 million, a lot by almost any standard, except for multibillionaires like Mr. Musk.

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