(Bloomberg) – Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, has challenged a claim by a United Nations official that only a small percentage of his wealth could help solve world hunger.
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Musk responded to comments from David Beasley, director of the UN World Food Program, who last week repeated a call after a previous tweet this month in which he asked billionaires like Musk to “act now, once and for all.”
Beasley specifically called on Musk and co-founder of Amazon.com Inc. to take action. Jeff Bezos, two men at the top of the Bloomberg billionaires index. Only $ 6 billion could prevent the deaths of 42 million people, Beasley said.
If the World Food Program can use transparent and open accounting to “accurately describe on this thread on Twitter how $ 6 billion will solve world hunger, I will sell Tesla shares right away and do so,” Musk wrote in a Twitter post.
Musk is the CEO of an electric vehicle company that joined a handful of companies worth more than a trillion dollars last week.
The $ 6 billion would be just a small fraction of Musk’s current net worth of $ 311 billion – and less than $ 9.3 billion, up just on Oct. 29, according to the Billionaires Index.
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