# Musk Foundation

The Musk Foundation is a US-based charitable foundation funded and directed primarily by Elon Musk. The foundation is dedicated to promoting renewable energy, crewed space exploration, pediatrics, science and engineering education, and the "development of safe artificial intelligence for the benefit of humanity". At the end of 2022, the foundation had assets of US$5 billion, $4.5 billion of which were in the form of shares in the carmaker Tesla.

## Formation and organization

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The Musk Foundation was established by Elon Musk and his brother Kimbal Musk in December 2001. It was initially registered in Los Angeles. It is now based in Austin, the capital of Texas. The foundation has no employees or full-time staff. It is managed by an unpaid board of directors consisting of Elon Musk and employees of his family office, Jared Birchall and Matilda Simon.

## Assets and inflows

The foundation was initially endowed with $2 million. From 2012 to 2015, it received a further $3 million. In 2016, Elon Musk donated Tesla shares worth $254 million to the foundation, thus avoiding tax payments that would have been due if he had sold the shares. In 2020, the foundation received another $4 million. Due to the increase in the price of Tesla shares, the foundation's assets rose to $3 billion by the end of 2020.
In 2021, Musk donated more Tesla shares to the Musk Foundation, worth $5.7 billion at the time. According to estimates, he may have avoided up to $2 billion in taxes that would have been incurred if he had sold the shares. Musk also donated Tesla shares in 2022, this time worth $1.95 billion. It is not yet known whether and to what extent these went to the Musk Foundation (as of February 2024).

## Donations

From 2002 to 2018, the foundation gave $25 million directly to nonprofit organizations, nearly half of which went to Musk's OpenAI, which was a nonprofit at the time. By 2020, the foundation had granted around 350 donations with a total volume of an estimated $100 million, including for Musk's non-profit organizations Ad Astra and OpenAI. Other donations went to the University of Pennsylvania, the Wikimedia Foundation, which operates Wikipedia, the AI think tank Future of Life Institute, the X-Prize Foundation for the Global Learning X-Prize, the nature conservation organizations Sierra Club and National Wildlife Federation, Oxfam and the Clinton Foundation. Other beneficiaries included his brother Kimbal's nonprofit Big Green. Elon Musk's favorite event – the Burning Man Festival in Nevada – was also donated to. Most of these donations were anonymized.
In September 2021, the Musk Foundation donated $55 million to St. Jude Children's Research Hospital as part of a fundraiser by SpaceX customer Jared Isaacman. In the same year, it provided $100 million for technologies to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
In 2022, the foundation awarded – as in the previous year – a total of $160 million in donation. 10 million of this went to The Foundation, a new foundation set up by Elon Musk, which is preparing to establish a school in Austin. The Foundation received a further $100 million in 2023.

## Criticism

Both the selection of recipients of donations and a relatively low payout ratio have been criticized. In 2021 and 2022, the Musk Foundation awarded less than 5% of its assets in donations, after its assets grew to several billion dollars. This means that it fell short of the legal minimum donation required to maintain its tax-exempt status. The Guardian criticized the fact that the foundation financed various projects of Musk and his family members, although this is not unusual for billionaires and wealthy donors. The New York Times concluded that through 2022, about half of the Musk Foundation's grants went to organizations "tied" to Musk, one of his employees, or one of his companies. Musk's philanthropy would be "largely self-serving." In one instance, after Musk challenged World Food Programme director David Beasley to draft a plan to use money of Musk's that Beasley said could contribute to ending world hunger, Musk instead donated the $6 billion in question to his own foundation even after Beasley's plan showed that the money could feed 42 million people for a year.
According to the biographer Walter Isaacson, Musk has little interest in philanthropy. He believes that he can do more for humanity by leaving his money in his companies and pursuing the goals of sustainable energy, space exploration and AI safety with them.
On December 12, 2024, The New York Times reported the foundation again awarded less than 5% of its assets in donations in 2024.