Elon Musk appears to have had a reasonably beneficiant 2021, philanthropy-wise, based on a current 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 high philanthropic donors, however in contrast to lots of his fellow billionaires Musk does not appear to have publicized the items – and the submitting does 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 major tax chew, so it is potential that the charitable giving was an try and offset Inside Income’s lower. As a Wall Road 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 by way of Getty Photographs
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 personal, however he has characteristically let just a few particulars slip on social media, reminiscent of 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 mission.
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, after all, can be dwarfed by the almost $6 billion price of Tesla inventory he reportedly gave away in 2021.
