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They were incredibly disingenuous about the Elon Musk thing. He said he'd sell $6bn of Tesla stock and donate it if they could provide an open source plan to c
by zirobi 4y ago
They were incredibly disingenuous about the Elon Musk thing.
He said he'd sell $6bn of Tesla stock and donate it if they could provide an open source plan to completely solve world hunger.
They said they'd written a private plan to reduce world hunger then criticised him for not making the donation.
Whatever you think of Elon, I don't think he acted in bad faith here.
- 2000UltraDeluxe 4y agoDefinitely not. Musk did not ask for anything outrageous in return for the money. It was a PR disaster from the UN's point of view. Perhaps their perception of the risk of calling Elon Musk out like that was broken?
- ben_w 4y agoWhile I was less than impressed by what I saw, I think calling it “a PR disaster” overstates the impact. I observed people reading into both parties what I already know they wanted to believe about each of Musk and the UN.
- 2000UltraDeluxe 4y agoDon't get me wrong; I normally don't like Musk's antics. However, we _know_ we can't end world hunger with 6 billion USD. At best, we can solve some urgent crisis, but an actual long-term solution requires more than billionaires flinging money at the problem. Beasley knew this when he opened his mouth.
- notahacker 4y agoNo, Elon responded saying that if they could describe exactly how world hunger could be solved "on this Twitter thread" he would donate $6bn. Nothing to do with "open source", everything to do with making the request undeliverable (UN staff did of course tweet links to already-too-long-for-Twitter UN documents at him)
- raspberry1337 4y agoConsidering the "plan" is a table with a list of countries and corresponding numbers that could easily fit on one image (who could have known it was this easy!), its actually very possible to fit into a twitter thread: https://www.wfp.org/stories/wfps-plan-support-42-million-people-brink-famine https://www.wfp.org/stories/wfps-plan-support-42-million-peo... In fact, a high schooler could have done the same job of multiplying x_starving_ppl_in_country * y_cost_of_food_one_year_per_person, so its quite suprising that it took them all this time to counter with their genius, open source plan