That would place him among the year’s top philanthropic donors, but unlike many of his fellow billionaires Musk doesn’t seem to have publicized the gifts – and the filing doesn’t even reveal the identities of the receiving organizations. But they do report a total of 5,044,000 Tesla shares given away to various charities, valued at about $5.7 billion altogether. Those sales are part of a total of $16 billion in Tesla stock Musk sold in the latter part of 2021. Selling that much stock leads to a significant tax bite, so it’s possible that the charitable giving was an attempt to offset Internal Revenue’s cut. As a Wall Street Journal article explains: “Donations of appreciated stock are particularly attractive for wealthy people. The forgone capital gains aren’t taxed. The value of the stock is a charitable deduction, subject to limits. And the stock comes out of the person’s taxable estate.” The $5.7 billion figure, as it happens, comes from calculating the value of the gift by the same methodology favored by the IRS – an average of the stock in question’s highest and lowest values on the day the gift is made. Musk is a signatory of the Giving Pledge, an open challenge to the ultra-wealthy to give away most of their fortunes over the course of their lives. Musk has kept much of his philanthropic activity private, but he has characteristically let a few details slip on social media, such as a $20 million donation to a Texas county school system in March of last year and another $10 million to another city in Texas for a downtown revitalization project. He also tweeted in 2018 about more than $100 million in Tesla stock that he’d purportedly sold to give the money to charity. That gift, of course, would be dwarfed by the nearly $6 billion worth of Tesla stock he reportedly gave away in 2021.
