Today, Explained - The world’s stingiest trillionaire

Episode Date: June 24, 2026

Ten ways Elon Musk could use his money to make the world a better place... and why he probably won’t. This episode was produced by Ariana Aspuru, edited by Jolie Myers, fact-checked by Gabriel Dunatov, engineered by Patrick Boyd and David Tatasciore, and hosted by Sean Rameswaram. A poster critical of Elon Musk's wealth from the "Everyone Hates Elon" activist group in England. Photo by Leon Neal/Getty Images. Listen to Today, Explained ad-free by becoming a Vox Member: vox.com/members. New Vox members get $20 off their membership right now. Transcript at ⁠vox.com/today-explained-podcast.⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

By now, you've surely heard that the second most divisive man on Earth, Elon Musk, recently became the world's first trillionaire. We should note that it's not like he's swimming in a trillion sacca joia, as the trillion dollars is tied to the worth of his companies and his stock in said companies, which of course fluctuates every day. But the point is that this man has more money than God now. When SpaceX IPOed, his net worth shot up to $1.4 trillion, $1. That made him about 13 times more wealthy than Bill Gates.

If you're middle class, that made him about 7 million times more wealthy than you are, he's worth more than Switzerland. I got some of those fun facts from a Vox piece titled 10 Things Elon Musk Can, but probably won't do with $1 trillion by our colleague Sarah Hirshander. I am Sarah Herschander, and I am a fellow for Vox's Future Perfect Section. And we'll be adapting that piece into audio for you on today, Explain from Vox. Support for To Explain comes from Adio, the AICRM. The CRM you use says a lot about how fast you want to move.

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Yeah, I've got a delivery from Elon Musk. Sign here. Hmm, okay. What do we have here? Number one. Pull hundreds of millions of people out of extreme poverty. So this is the worst kind of poverty. And it would cost just $318 billion annually. Policy folks have been trying to crunch that number for many years now. And this is from yet a year ago. Some of the policymakers were from the group Give Directly, which does. do direct cash transfers to people who are living in extreme poverty. And basically it's accounting for all of the money it would take to like set up a system

where you're giving people enough cash and enough food, water, shelter, what have you, so that they're not in that very, very most risky point of poverty. Oh, there's something else under here. Number two. Pay off all medical debt in the United States. So that's paying all of the money that about one in three Americans now have to pay and pass to medical bills. More than 100 million Americans are burdened with medical bills they can't pay.

I have about $8,500 in medical debt. How much am I being sued for? $5,443.57. In total, I have about $20,000 in medical debt from delivering a baby and having him stay in the NICU for four months. Oftentimes, really predatory debt that they get into for reasons that are totally outside of their control. And there's about $220 billion of it in the U.S.

right now. So even less than it would cost to eliminate the worst forms of poverty. Number three. Bankroll Universal Preschool. So the thing that American parents spend tens of thousands of dollars on each year, there have been a lot of sort of number crunching around how much this would cost lately because there's a lot of sort of political buzz about what it would take to make this a reality. Right now, it looks like it would cost about $351 billion over 10 years, which includes, like, constructing new preschools and, like, hiring teachers and scaling up already existing infrastructure to give every preschooler in the U.S. a free preschool education. And he's got, like, hundreds of kids himself, so that would, like, personally benefit him.

Yeah, well, right now, what's funny is some of the only philanthropy that Musk has publicly given or is publicly disclosed giving has been to his own private school network very close to SpaceX headquarters. in Texas. So there is some precedent here for Musk giving to education. He just needs to give it a little bit more widely. Number four. Climate proof the world. So this is really important, and it's a very underfunded issue.

And it's a pretty big price tag. This is actually the biggest price tag on the list. And it would require all of Musk's money to climate. I know, $1.2 trillion, poor guy. He'd be poor. He'd be literally poor after that. He would be poor. He would not have any money.

So that's how big of a deal it is. But he could still put in a dent without like, you know, paying off the entire price stack of $1.2 trillion. But that's just like a way of thinking about like this stuff is really important. These are like the cooling systems, the flood protection, the sort of strategies that we need to keep people safe. Number five. End world hunger. And this is one that we've actually heard Musk talk about before. So a few years ago, he said that he would sell off about $6 billion worth of Tesla stock.

to support the World Food Program, if they could prove that they would use their money in a way that would end the most severe forms of global hunger. If WFP can describe on this Twitter thread exactly how $6 billion will solve world hunger, I will sell Tesla stock right now and do it. And so the World Food Program came back with like an actual analysis of what this would look like. Everything that he asked for, bullet point, bullet point of what it would cost to sort of make sure that nobody is dying of starvation around the world or preventable starvation around the world. And he basically ghosted them.

So I don't have huge hopes for this one. But it does have a pretty doable price tag of $93 billion annually, according to the United Nations, to end global hunger by 2030. So it cost about $465 billion over that time, which is about half of how much Musk has now. He would still have about $500 billion to play around with, do what he wants, continue trying to go to Mars, what have you. But again, so far we haven't heard back from Musk on if this is something he'd be

interested in. Number six. Research cures for diseases like cancer. And this one's really interesting because the U.S. has been a leading incubator of scientific research and medical research. And that's using about $993 billion in investments from the government, from private industry, and from philanthropy. So Elon Musk, again, this is another big bet. If he wanted to take all of his money and put it into something valuable, he could literally double the U.S. budget for scientific and medical research, which could make a huge difference for some of these really intractable diseases like cancer, like heart disease. And it would also help to make up for the billions in federal science funding that's been cut under the Trump administration. That he could do for very little money if he wanted to just sort of close that funding gap.

Was he involved in some of those cuts with Doge? This is the chainsaw for bureaucracy. Change saw. Yeah. He was involved in funding cuts to that. This is a good thing to mention. He was also involved in cuts to funding to fight against the most extreme forms of poverty, which we were talking about earlier and against global hunger.

A lot of like sort of where the funding lies now is still under development. But again, his track record is not great on these issues. and research is no exception. Although, again, this is an area where Musk has his own sort of interests of the philanthropy that he's given so far. A lot of it has gone to these sort of scientific breakthrough experiments because it falls in line with his interests. Like he wants the robots.

He wants to go to Mars. I don't know how much he cares about medicine. But like he has given to scientific breakthroughs before. So this might be a good one for him where he doesn't have to feel like he's, you know, giving too much money for people to eat or, you know, live in a nice house. Because who would want to do that? Who would want that? Let's keep going to number seven.

Bringing everyone clean drinking water. And the cost, according to the United Nations, of bringing everyone in the world clean drinking water would be about $114 billion per year. So again, for Musk, this is a kind of modest investment. He could fund this for year after year. And presumably as the years go by, it would also get cheaper because you already have some of that water infrastructure in place. Number eight. Ending homelessness in America. And now there are a lot of different sort of estimates on how much that would cost because

homelessness is such a complicated issue. But most of the estimates that I've seen put the number at somewhere between $10 billion and $30 billion each year. And that's to house the 770,000 Americans that don't have a home at any given time. So again, this is actually a pretty cheap one. He could do this and not even notice the change in his net worth because, again, a trillion dollars is $1,000 billions. This is just 10 to 30 of those billions. Number nine. Wipe out tuberculosis and malaria for good.

So these are another two diseases that we actually do have a lot of great treatments for and a lot of great preventative measures for. The problem is we don't have the money that we need to make sure that they don't still kill people. and tuberculosis remains the deadliest infectious disease in the world. It infects about 10 million people every year, and it kills about 1.5 million. And estimates for what it would take to eradicate tuberculosis for good is about $250 billion. Not so much for Elon Musk. And if we wanted to tackle on malaria to that, it would cost another $8.5 billion per year. It's still less than maybe a quarter of his net worth right now to eradicate these two.

really, really, really destructive diseases. All right, here we go. Finally, the last one, number 10. Simply give everyone in the world a check for $146. This is based on a $1.2 trillion net worth. His actual money has been vacillating a little bit as the IPO takes hold. But if we divided that by the 8.2 billion people on Earth, literally everyone could get a $146 stimulus check, which means that you can afford almost an annual Netflix subscription if you're living in the U.S., a week or two of groceries.

But if you're living in somewhere a low or middle-income country, especially a very low-income country, that could actually make a really big difference to your life. You might be able to afford a few months worth of food, of clothing, of shelter that you wouldn't be able to otherwise. Wow, Sarah, thank you for that list. a real embarrassment of riches in terms of ways to just end suffering in this world. Do we think Elon Musk will do any of it? Short answer is probably not. What we've heard from him so far is that he doesn't even really believe in money anymore. Money will stop being relevant at some point in the future.

Currency becomes irrelevant. Which sounds insane coming from a trillionaire, but it's not so rogue from what a lot of these kind of new AI billionaires have been saying over the past few years, which is that the economy is going to be so drastically transformed that money won't be worth what it was anymore. But there's only basically one way to make everyone wealthy, and that is AI and robotics. And so given that sort of ideology and given his track record of giving Forbes put it at less than 1% of his fortune to charity each year, it seems unlikely this will happen anytime soon and also based off of his track record. It seems unlikely that even if the robots do bring all of this abundant food and water and shelter that it'll be shared very fairly. But I hope I'm wrong. Has he spoken about it? This guy gives the occasional interview.

Has anyone asked him like, hey, man, why don't you give more of your money away? His answer is that most of his contribution to humanity comes from his companies, will always come from his companies, will probably come from the robots and the sending humans to Mars and the what have you, and not from philanthropy, which he tends to regard with a lot of suspicion. It's very easy to give money away to get the appearance of goodness. It is very difficult to give money away for the reality of goodness. Earlier in his career, he had a little bit more of an openness to it. He formed his own foundation. He kind of hung out with, with Bill Gates and the rest of the, like, billionaire philanthropist club for a little while. But that's just not sort of the tune he's been taking for the past year, the past few years or so. It's just not something that interests him anymore. And he doesn't seem to see value in it.

You can read Sarah's list at Vox if our adaptation wasn't enough for you. But when we're back, we're going to talk about the billionaire philanthropist club and how they're not really hacking it either. Support for today explained comes from Shopify. When you're starting a new business, it's easy to doubt. You might ask yourself, should I? Should I really? What if no one cares? Maybe a better way to think about it is, what if this is a great decision?

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Today. Do you remember the giving pledge? A bunch of billionaires making big, splashy promises to give away all their money before or when they die? Bella Devon remembers the giving pledge. In fact, she and her colleagues at the Institute for Policy Studies have been kind of grading its effectiveness. And Elon Musk signed the Giving Pledge, which was founded by Bill Gates, somebody who's kind of a nemesis of his now.

So the Giving Pledge was a voluntary philanthropic commitment founded by Bill Gates, his then-wife, Melinda French Gates, and Berkshire Hathaway Chair Warren Buffett. The idea is that people who are engaged in philanthropy will write a letter talking about what they're doing, and they make a commitment to give the majority of their wealth. either during their life or through their will. You can give any time. The idea is to make the commitment, to get over the hurdle of saying, don't wait until I think about this later in my life, but think about it now and think about giving.

And if those little pieces of paper can translate, whether it's into children avoiding diseases, becoming better educated, whether people are having a better life in their old age, whatever it may be, that's terrific, you know. And I think a lot of people feel the same way. They founded this in 2010. Since then, you know, north of 250 people in the world have signed onto this pledge.

It's always been in the U.S. around 13 to 14% of domestic billionaires. And it's people with tons of money who feel like signing on to something like this is something that they could do or at least want to be seen as pledging to do. So the Giving Pledge is now 16 years old. My team did a study at 15, you know, old enough for a driver's permit, we were saying. And we feel like there's a significant body of evidence that the pledge is unfulfilled and unfulfutable. So of the 32 original signers who are still billionaires, and again, these numbers are from last summer, they had collectively gotten 283% wealthier or 166% adjusting for inflation since they signed onto the pledge. And only one couple in the group fulfilled their pledge. So the idea is to get poorer over time.

And meanwhile, almost everyone, or if not everyone, has gotten, like, significantly richer. That's exactly right. I think McKenzie Scott, who is one of the most prolific and generous giving pledgers, she's given away on yield giving's count. That's her charitable entity, $26 billion. I think she's only decreased her wealth by around less than $6 billion since, you know, her separation from Jeff Bezos. So if that's what the most generous philanthropist is struggling to keep up. with, you know, everybody else is faring far worse. Is it because they don't genuinely want to give their money away? Or is it because they're simply doing so well all the time and getting exponentially richer all the time that it is really hard to do? If we want to give them some credit, yes, it is mathematically incredibly challenging to give away as much money as their skyrocketing wealth.

But I definitely think these billionaires are not. not stepping up to the plate and giving as much as they should and even as much as they've committed to. Although a great caveat of the giving pledge is that you get to fulfill it upon your death in your will, that could look like giving your children control of your charitable intermediaries. A big part of our study was finding out that 80% around four-fifths of all the gifts that these pledgers have given go into private foundations often that they control. So that's what it looks like when you can make a donation that seems like you're parting with, with your wealth and, you know, delivering some kind of benefit to the public, but actually that

money doesn't reach public charities or public works or on the ground aid until it leaves the foundation. And there's a significant lack time in there. And what's wrong with all the money going to, like, their foundation that then goes and distributes money to, I don't know, needy children, medical research firms, whatever it might be? You know, a waste station lengthens the journey, right? We figured out that out of all of the living pledgers who are still billionaires when they signed on, their median foundation payout rate was 9.2% a year. If you're getting so much wealthier and your foundation is only giving away a single digit percentage point of your foundation's wealth every year, and you've gotten a tax incentive and reduction up front for your gift, which the general public is subsidizing up to 73 cents per dollar, that's a very significant. investment you're asking the public to shoulder, and that money is trickling out back to the public.

It's not keeping pace. Is there any good news here, Bella? Like, have we accomplished anything? Have we eradicated any diseases? Have we cured any diseases? Have we eradicated homelessness in certainly not this country, but another one? I don't know. It depends who you ask, but I would say no.

No good news. I think that, you know, there's a lot of. The great indignity of philanthropy and concentrated wealth at this scale is that multiple things can be true at once. It can be true that billionaires over-exert their power, that they are able to influence the state of science, innovation, the deliverance of public aid, the shape of housing policy, and that can make significant inroads and deliver benefits to people. You know, there's no arguing with that.

But at the same time, they can be hoarding wealth, not doing enough. sitting on their laurels, you know, banking on this idea that the reputational benefit of signing the pledge is enough. And that those two things can be true at the same time while regular people are struggling to make ends meet means that the system is in need of a dramatic overhaul. And if the billionaires who promised to give half their money away are doing this poorly at it, that tells us everything that we need to know. Tell us about an overhaul. Like what, if you designed the giving pledge or a system that's altogether different, what would it look like? If it were up to me, I think the number one most meaningful intervention is to figure out how to tax wealth, figure out how to restructure our economy, so that people can't accumulate these fortunes in the first place over which they can exercise such plutocratic control. But knowing that we live in a society that has all these billionaires already, has all these foundations,

with piles of money that haven't been deployed for the public benefit, I think we have to increase transparency so that donors can't use donor advised funds and other popular intermediary in foundations to conduct dark money-giving or play shell games to change the timing of tax benefits so that philanthropists have to make the gift and then see their tax benefit instead of getting it up front without having any obligation to move money. Okay, I'm hearing lots of ideas from you. I'm hearing tax the rich.

I'm hearing reform tax code. I'm hearing, you know, change public policy, which noble, but as you could admit, you know, less likely to happen. It really sort of just reaffirms why something like the giving pledge would have been so attractive in the first place. Because it's big, it's splashy, ethical, moral, humanitarian. generous, all of these things. And I just wonder, have all of those things become less in vogue 15 years down the road? Like Elon Musk talks about empathy as a weakness. The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy.

As the richest person on Earth, he made cuts to U.S. aid programs that directly resulted in hundreds of thousands of people dying. and people still love him. And as we saw in recent weeks, like really want to desperately invest in his companies and make him even richer. Do you think we've seen like a cultural shift around giving around empathy itself? Yes, in these political conditions, the giving pledge is what we're stuck with.

We're stuck with waiting for a voluntary effort to reshape society instead of knowing that we'll get structural reform that would be guaranteed to deliver it. these are all very concerning trends. And philanthropy in America has always been an expectation of the wealthy people in the country, you know, reaching back to Andrew Carnegie and Rockefeller, that that is what is expected of a rich person in America if our tax code isn't going to adequately regulate them. And that value is no longer closely held at all.

You know, regular people are as generous as they can be. We see this in remittances. We see this in small donations to your local food bank, to your religious institution. Everyday people are as generous as they can be, and I think that our ultra-wealthy people need to take after them more. Bella Devon is the director of the charity reform initiative, at the Institute for Policy Studies. Ariana Spurro is a producer.

She made today's show. Jolie Myers edited Patrick Boyd and David Tadishore mixed. Gabriel Donatab donated facts. I'm Sean Ramos from, and it's giving today explain. Feel like you're being told to wave a magic AI wand, and everything will just get better? Sure, AI can chat and summarize. But what about big business?

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