Baiting Elon Musk is never a winning move. It’s not that he doesn’t leave himself open to it but, when he bites, he does so with a tenacity few can match and with pockets deep enough to deliver on sometimes wild assertions.
The latest to find themselves on the wrong side of the acerbic tongue of the world’s richest man is the executive director of the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP), David Beasley.
He runs an organisation of 20,000 people that won the Nobel Peace Prize last year for its work bringing food to people in more than 80 countries around the world, mostly people who have been displaced by conflict. It is, among other things, apparently the world’s largest supplier of school meals.
One of the good guys in other words.
Beasley’s mistake was to challenge Musk publicly. In a CNN interview last week, he called on Musk, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and “other billionaires” to step up on “a one-time basis” and give “$6 billion to help 42 million people that are literally going to die if we don’t reach them”.
“It’s not complicated,” he said.
Taking to his favourite medium, Twitter, Musk shot back: “If WFP can describe on this Twitter thread exactly how 6B will solve world hunger, I will sell Tesla stock right now and do it.
“But it must be open source accounting, so the public sees precisely how the money is spent,” he added.
The humanitarian chief in turn took to Twitter to clarify that the $6 billion would not end world hunger but would go a long way to address immediate crises due to Covid/conflict/climate and offered to meet the Tesla boss.
Not so quick. Musk, who is famously critical of efforts to target America’s wealthy for tax and slow to sell down his shareholding in his company, urged the UN executive to “publish your current and proposed spending in detail so people can see exactly where money goes. Sunlight is a wonderful thing”.
It’s fair to say the busy humanitarian chief might regret his public dressing down.
