Elon Musk offers to sell TSLA stock if UN shows how $6B would solve world hunger
cnn.com
cnn.com
The use of "Exactly" seems designed to grant enough wiggle room, for Musk to dismiss even the most conclusive data.
Musk also seems to be dismissing the stated goal of "helping solve world hunger" in favor of the misstatement - 'solve world hunger'.
Heck, the UN WFP's own annual budget is about $9B. You'd think that amount of money would allow them to solve world hunger and still have $3B left over to respond to emergency situations etc.
WFP's accounting is usually highly suspect though. For example, a recent report on food waste reported about 900 million tons is wasted. But when you did into the details, they included inedible parts of food. That is a ridiculous methodology: I weighed a banana & its peel when I saw that, and it turns out that by that methodology banana peels alone would account for roughly 30 million tons of "waste". Add in orange peels and pineapple rinds and that's about another 20 million tons.
Maybe Musk wouldn't follow through, but a claim of $6B to solve a problem that has been intractable for decades seems like a ridiculous claim. If the WFP suddenly had a magic bullet solution like that, there would be plenty of people chipping in to help. Their lack of details on how they arrived at that number and how they would implement their plan if they had the money speaks for itself though.
Even If seems a little strong here. Musk's phrasing doesn't indicate that 'he really wants to be part of helping solve world hunger and that he just needs the data to make it happen'.
'How Dare You' is a better match.
Here's the link:
https://edition.cnn.com/2021/10/26/economy/musk-world-hunger...
I thought the headline was incredibly stupid at the time. They added a "correction" at the bottom of the page now:
>-- Correction: An earlier version of this story's headline incorrectly stated that the director of the UN's food scarcity organization believes 2% of Elon Musk's wealth could solve world hunger. He believes it could help solve world hunger.
Right.
That's a blunder on the headline of the article, sure, but is the suggestion here that Elon whipped out that offer to liquidate $6B without reading the article itself or watching the interview on the topic? Direct quote from the interview where the UN rep was talking about it, which was also included in the original article:
"$6 billion to help 42 million people that are literally going to die if we don't reach them. It's not complicated"
Well, he certainly whipped it out to rhetorically appeal to people who hadn't read the article or watched the interview, whether or not he personally read/watched them.
Precisely. This is Musk front-loading technicalities into his blustery non-offer.
> Nope. That's a CNN blunder
An assertion that CNN made a blunder about $6B toward the 42M facing starvation - is false.
By offering a broad correction that wasn't limited to the one-word CNN error, the whole of your post became non-factual.
>The UN says $6B from the world's billionaires could solve a hunger crisis. Elon Musk says he will sell Tesla stock and donate proceeds if the UN can prove that.
From this link:
https://www.yahoo.com/news/un-says-6b-worlds-billionaires-03...
Are we arguing that news headlines are not the resposibility of news organizations?
Bear in mind, that headline is recent. Should we still go with Occam's razor here, or is this a clear attempt to get clicks, you know, given the fact that this headline came way after the correction but still commits the same "mistake" which is more click inducing than stating the facts ?
>By offering a broad correction that wasn't limited to the one-word CNN error, the whole of your post became non-factual.
What does that even mean?
> UN World Food Programme (WFP) director David Beasley challenged the ultra-wealthy — and in particular the world's two richest men Jeff Bezos and Musk — to "step up now, on a one-time basis" to help solve world hunger in an interview with CNN last week.
> "$6 billion will not solve world hunger, but it WILL prevent geopolitical instability, mass migration and save 42 million people on the brink of starvation. An unprecedented crisis and a perfect storm due to Covid/conflict/climate crises," he [David Beasley] added.