(Boursier.com) — While he proceeded at the end of last year to important share sales You’re here, Elon Musk has also given 5.7 billion dollars to charities. The donations took the form of Tesla shares, and ranks Musk the second-highest U.S. donor after Bill and Melinda Gates last year, according to data from the Chronicle of Philanthropy. Tesla’s chief executive donated a total of 5,044,000 shares of the automaker to charities from Nov. 19 to 29 last year, a statement to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission showed on Monday. That donation was worth $5.74 billion, based on Tesla’s closing stock prices on the five days he donated the shares. The statement does not reveal the names of charities.
The donations came as the billionaire sold $16.4 billion worth of shares after quizzing Twitter users about selling his 10% stake in the electric car maker in early November. At the same time, Musk had also exercised millions of call options to maintain his stake. Musk had said on Twitter that he would pay more than $11 billion in taxes in 2021 as a result of his stock option exercise, an all-time high for an individual in the United States. Musk then engaged in rather tough exchanges with politicians Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, who called for even more taxation of the rich.
Musk’s donations arguably give him a tax advantage, with shares donated to charity thankfully not subject to capital gains tax, as they would be if sold. “Its tax advantage would be huge,” Bob Lord, a research fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies who studies tax policy, was quoted by Reuters as saying. Lord believes that Musk may have brought the shares to intermediaries and not directly to charitable groups.
The amount of the donations recalls the exchange between Musk and the director of the United Nations food program in November. Musk had offered $6 billion to the United Nations to eradicate world hunger, if the organization showed him precisely how such an amount could save so many lives.
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