Elon Musk appears to have had a reasonably beneficiant 2021, philanthropy-wise, in line with a latest securities submitting. Theat submitting signifies that Musk gave a powerful $5.7 billion price of shares in Tesla to charity over the course of final yr in a number of totally different inventory gross sales.
That might place him among the many yr’s prime philanthropic donors, however not like a lot of his fellow billionaires Musk would not appear to have publicized the presents – and the submitting would not even reveal the identities of the receiving organizations. However they do report a complete of 5,044,000 Tesla shares given away to numerous charities, valued at about $5.7 billion altogether. These gross sales are a part of a complete of $16 billion in Tesla inventory Musk offered within the latter a part of 2021.
Promoting that a lot inventory results in a big tax chew, so it is potential that the charitable giving was an try to offset Inside Income’s reduce. As a Wall Avenue Journal article explains:
“Donations of appreciated inventory are significantly engaging for rich individuals. The forgone capital beneficial properties aren’t taxed. The worth of the inventory is a charitable deduction, topic to limits. And the inventory comes out of the individual’s taxable property.“
BRITTA PEDERSEN/POOL/AFP through Getty Pictures
The $5.7 billion determine, because it occurs, comes from calculating the worth of the present by the identical methodology favored by the IRS – a mean of the inventory in query’s highest and lowest values on the day the present is made.
Musk is a signatory of the Giving Pledge, an open problem to the ultra-wealthy to present away most of their fortunes over the course of their lives. Musk has saved a lot of his philanthropic exercise non-public, however he has characteristically let just a few particulars slip on social media, comparable to a $20 million donation to a Texas county college system in March of final yr and one other $10 million to a different metropolis in Texas for a downtown revitalization venture.
He additionally tweeted in 2018 about greater than $100 million in Tesla inventory that he’d purportedly offered to present the cash to charity. That present, in fact, can be dwarfed by the almost $6 billion price of Tesla inventory he reportedly gave away in 2021.
