The holidays may be approaching, but it appears that SpaceX and Tesla CEO Elon Musk is remaining a total scrooge.

The New York Times reports that the centibillionaire’s charity, the Musk Foundation, failed to give away the minimum amount of money it was supposed to last year by a stupendous margin of $421 million.

This continues Musk’s pattern of shadily managing his ostensibly philanthropic efforts, such as when he made it seem like he was donating billions of dollars to the United Nations to combat world hunger but instead funneled that money to his own charity.

Now, if Musk doesn’t give away that sum by the end of 2024, he will be forced to pay a “sizable penalty” to the Internal Revenue Service, according to NYT‘s reporting.

Pocket Change

According to the NYT, Musk’s charity has increasingly fallen behind on payments despite possessing some $9 billion in assets today. It was $41 million short in 2021, $234 million in 2022, and is now approaching half a billion this year.

He’s made up for those shortfalls so far by paying late, but only barely. “The distributions made by the foundation are meeting the bare minimum to avoid penalties,” Brian Mittendorf, an accounting professor at the Ohio State University, told the NYT. “It is clear that the organization is not in a hurry to spend its money.”

The newspaper notes that other charitable foundations have fallen short of the IRS’s minimum by millions of dollars, but that Musk’s is an anomaly even among those because of the staggering sum it has to pay and the rate at which that shortfall is increasing.

And there are other shady facets of the organization, the NYT found. It’s never hired employees, and its three directors — Musk is one of them — have spent just two hours per week at the foundation over the past three years.

In the cases where it has actually given away money, it has often gone to organizations with close ties to Musk. In 2023, he made a $137 million donation to a nonprofit called The Foundation run by several of Musk’s close associates, which operates a private school in Texas close to where several of Musk’s businesses are based and where he plans to build a large subdivision for his employees.

Tax Attack

Ultra-wealthy figures have long used philanthropic organizations as a refuge from the treasury department, taking advantage of their generous tax breaks. That’s nothing new.

But this dodgy charity management is especially hypocritical behavior from Musk, who has championed increased scrutiny into how government funds are spent and has proposed slashing trillions of dollars in federal expenditures through his so-called Department of Government Efficiency, which will be formed as part of the incoming Trump administration.

One of his chief targets, unsurprisingly, has been the IRS. Musk recently suggested “deleting” the federal agency, while consistently calling for the hollowing out of others. Even before his DOGE crusade and overt rightward turn, Musk has groused publicly about government tax men and spread obvious falsities about the IRS.

For someone so concerned about scrupulous spending, then, it seems that Musk can be quite underhanded with how he spends his fortune.

Last modified: December 15, 2024