Elon Musk has said, more than once, that “money won’t matter” much longer — that AI and robots will make everything so cheap and abundant that wealth will lose its meaning. Now a Nobel Prize winner is testing Musk on how much he really believes that.
Daron Acemoglu, an Institute Professor of economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who shared the 2024 Nobel Prize in economics,put the challenge to Musk on X: if money won’t matter in a decade, “Why don’t you pledge to donate your current wealth of approximately $1 trillion to charity no later than 2036.”
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Following through, Acemoglu wrote, would show Musk trusts his own forecasts about AI, and would calm people who worry about how much influence the very rich now hold. He attached one condition. An impartial body should vet the charities and confirm they’re effective and non-ideological.
Musk answered the same day: “I am actually going to do something along these lines!”
He put no number on it and no date.
The dare came with a catch
That vetting condition is where things get complicated, because Musk’s giving has mostly stayed inside his own orbit.
The New York Times reviewed the Musk Foundation’s 2024 tax filing and found more than $14 billion in assets, with donations since 2020 going largely to groups tied to Musk and his companies. Forbes, working from the same filing, counted $474 million in grants for the year, most of it to entities Musk controls. The largest single grant, $370 million, went to a nonprofit that runs an elementary school in Bastrop, Texas, near several of his businesses.
Private foundations have to hand out 5% of the fair market value of their assets every year. Musk came up roughly $400 million short in 2024 — the fourth year running. Foundations that miss the mark can face a 30% excise tax on what they held back, though the rules let them close a gap with later grants, and Musk has done that before rather than pay.
Acemoglu’s condition would move those decisions outside of Musk’s control entirely.
Musk, Tesla and the Musk Foundation did not respond to requests for comment by the time of publication.
Musk added his name to the Giving Pledge in 2012, a public commitment to give away at least half a fortune of their wealth to philanthropic causes in their wills or while they’re still living. Nothing about it is enforceable, and Bill Gates has questioned whether Musk will keep his promise.
Musk’s own words haven’t helped. He told Nikhil Kamath on the WTF podcast in December 2025 that he agrees with helping other people, then added: “But it’s very difficult to give away money well.” He’s been dismissive of people who give at scale, too. On June 27,the viral account Pubity posted about MacKenzie Scott’s donations, and an anonymous user with about 22,500 followers replied that she was making the world worse. Musk’s answer: “Sadly, yes.”
Scott has given away more than $26 billion and is still worth close to $35 billion,according to Bloomberg’s billionaires index. She was also the largest individual donor of 2025, at about $7 billion. Musk’s fortune is roughly 27 times what she has donated in total.
Forbes estimates Musk has moved $8.5 billion of Tesla stock into his charitable foundations, but only about $500 million has ever reached people in need — 0.06% of his fortune.
The $1 trillion figure keeps moving
Musk became the first trillionaire on record on June 12, the day SpaceX went public.The stock has retreated about 30% from its high, and the title of trillionaire was gone before the month ended. By July 28, Forbes had him with a net worth near $715 billion.
Nearly all of Musk’s wealth sits in Tesla (Nasdaq:TSLA) and SpaceX (Nasdaq:SPCX) stock and options. Any pledge would mean signing over shares in installments across a decade, and each installment would be worth whatever the two companies are worth on the day it moves.
Gita Gopinath, formerly of the International Monetary Fund, aimed at the logic itself: If money really won’t matter in 2036, Musk may not have a trillion left to give, which raises the question of why anyone values it at a trillion today.
Musk’s follow-through has been uneven before. In 2021, he offered $6 billion to the World Food Programme if the agency could show how the money would end world hunger, and nothing came of it.
Whether this time is different depends on items Musk hasn’t offered yet: a signed commitment, a date and someone else deciding where the money lands. Acemoglu asked for all three. So far Musk has given one sentence.
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