Tesla CEO Elon Musk donated nearly $6 billion of shares to charity, one of biggest donations in history

Elon Musk, who is the CEO of SpaceX and Tesla, has made one of the biggest ever donations to charity, by donating around 5.7 billion USD worth of Tesla shares to a trust, which amounts to over 40 thousand crore rupees in Indian currency.

As per the filings of the Security and Exchange Commission (SEC), Elon Musk, who is currently the world’s richest man, has made this massive donation of $5.7 billion of Tesla shares, based on average prices the days he sold the stock.

This has become one of the largest donations to charity in history, according to Bloomberg. Further, the name of the trust involved in the transaction has not been made public yet and has not been mentioned in the SEC documentation.

This news comes as the Tesla CEO was embroiled in a battle with notable politicians Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren over inequality and a potential wealth levy. During this feud, Elon Musk had also said that he’d sell the stock if the United Nations could come up with a plan to end world hunger.

Musk had made the statement after the global agency had food-aid arm suggested billionaires like Musk should “step up now, on a one-time basis." This comes a year after Musk claimed that his tax bill would be one of the biggest in US history, while a donation of this size could have helped reduce it significantly.

As per news agency Bloomberg, it was calculated in December that Musk could owe more than $10 billion to the Internal Revenue Service, triggered by his exercise of an unusually large number of options in 2021.

The donation came as the billionaire sold $16.4 billion worth of shares after polling Twitter users about offloading 10 percent of his stake in the electric-car maker in early November. He said on Twitter that he would pay more than $11 billion in taxes in 2021 due to his exercise of stock options set to expire this year.

Bob Lord, an associate fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies who studies tax policy, while talking to Reuters, said that the tax benefit behind this massive gift to charity could be huge.

"He'd save between 40 percent and 50 percent of the $5.7 billion in tax, depending on whether he could take the deduction against his California income and he'd avoid the gains tax he would have to pay if he sold the stock,” Lord said.

(With inputs from agencies)