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15th Feb 2023

Elon Musk makes huge multi-billion dollar charitable donation using Tesla shares

Charlie Herbert

It’s not the first time he’s made a huge donation of Tesla shares

Elon Musk says he donated around $1.95bn (£1.6bn) worth of Tesla shares to charity last year.

The donation of 11.6 million shares was described in a filing with US regulators as “a bona fide gift”.

The filing did not name the recipient, or recipients, of the donation.

The document lodged with the US Securities and Exchange Commission showed the donation was made between August and December last year, the BBC reports.

This is not the first time the Tesla chief executive has given away stock in the electric car manufacturer to charity.

In 2021, he donated roughly $5.74bn worth of shared, according to a regulatory filing.

He also said on Twitter that year, that he planned to donate $20m to schools in Cameron County and $10m to the city of Brownsville in Texas for “downtown revitalization”.

Musk is still in the process of trying to find his successor as chief executive of Twitter, but said on Wednesday that he plans on completing this process by the end of 2023.

“I’m guessing probably towards the end of this year would be good timing to find someone else to run the company, because I think it should be in a stable position around, you know, at the end of this year,” he said.

“I think I need to stabilise the organisation and just make sure it’s in a financially healthy place and that the product roadmap is clearly laid out,” he said on a video link at the World Government Summit in Dubai.

Musk purchased the social media platform for $44bn in October last year, but since then things haven’t gone brilliantly for him.

In January, he became the first person ever to lose $200 billion off his net worth, according to the Bloomberg Billionaire’s Index.

Musk, 51, whose net worth peaked in November 2021 at $340 billion, has seen his wealth plunge to $137 million as Tesla shares have plummeted 65 per cent in the past year. It has been the electric carmaker’s worst year to date.

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