Securities Filing Indicates That Elon Musk Gave Nearly $6 Billion In Tesla Shares To Charity Last Year | Celebrity Net Worth 2026

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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."

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Primary Income Streams & Multi-Million Contracts

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.