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 formidable $5.7 billion price of shares in Tesla to charity over the course of final 12 months in a number of totally different inventory gross sales.
That may place him among the many 12 months’s prime philanthropic donors, however not like lots of his fellow billionaires Musk would not appear to have publicized the items – 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 varied 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 chunk, so it is attainable that the charitable giving was an try and offset Inner Income’s lower. As a Wall Avenue Journal article explains:
“Donations of appreciated inventory are notably engaging for rich individuals. The forgone capital good points aren’t taxed. The worth of the inventory is a charitable deduction, topic to limits. And the inventory comes out of the particular person’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 reward by the identical methodology favored by the IRS – a mean of the inventory in query’s highest and lowest values on the day the reward is made.
Musk is a signatory of the Giving Pledge, an open problem to the ultra-wealthy to provide away most of their fortunes over the course of their lives. Musk has stored a lot of his philanthropic exercise personal, however he has characteristically let a couple of particulars slip on social media, comparable to a $20 million donation to a Texas county college system in March of final 12 months and one other $10 million to a different metropolis in Texas for a downtown revitalization undertaking.
He additionally tweeted in 2018 about greater than $100 million in Tesla inventory that he’d purportedly offered to provide the cash to charity. That reward, in fact, can be dwarfed by the practically $6 billion price of Tesla inventory he reportedly gave away in 2021.
