Tesla CEO Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, challenged a United Nations official’s claim that just a small percentage of his wealth could help solve world hunger.
Musk was responding to comments by David Beasley, director of the UN’s World Food Programme, who repeated a call last week following an earlier tweet this month asking billionaires like Musk to “step up now, on a one-time basis.”
Beasley specifically called for action from Musk and Amazon.com Inc. co-founder Jeff Bezos, the two men atop the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
Just $6 billion could keep 42 million people from dying, Beasley said.
If the World Food Programme, using transparent and open accounting, “can describe on this Twitter thread exactly how $6B will solve world hunger, I will sell Tesla stock right now and do it,” Musk wrote in a Twitter post.
Tesla last week joined the handful of companies valued at more than $1 trillion.
The $6 billion amount would be just a small fraction of Musk’s current net worth of $311 billion — and less than the $9.3 billion his wealth increased on Oct. 29 alone, according to Bloomberg’s wealth index.
Tesla forms the vast majority of Musk’s net worth. He’s very rarely sold stock in the EV maker, whose shares reached a record $1,114 on Friday. The shares opened 3.2 percent higher on Monday morning as well.
Musk’s fortune has also surged thanks to his stake in SpaceX, a private space-exploration company that was valued at about $100 billion last month.
Musk, frequently outspoken on social media, has also been critical of attempts to tax U.S. billionaires.
He said on Twitter that a levy on billionaire wealth would only make a “small dent” toward paying off the national debt, arguing that the focus should be on government spending. Musk also said a billionaire tax would just be the start of taxing the merely wealthy.