Elon Musk plans to offer $100m prize for best carbon capture technology

Elon Musk is now worth $201.4 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. Photo by NICHOLAS KAMM / AFP

Elon Musk said he plans to donate $100 million toward a prize for the best carbon capture technology, weeks after he became the world’s richest person.

Mr Musk made the announcement on Thursday through Twitter, his preferred medium of communication, and said details would come next week.

The Tesla co-founder’s net worth surged in the past year, boosting him past Jeff Bezos, as the carmaker delivered consistent profits, attracted legions of retail investors and earned inclusion in the S&P 500 Index.

The South African-born entrepreneur is now worth $201.4 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.

One of his first reactions on becoming the wealthiest human, after an initial shrug, was to solicit advice on how to give it away.

Mr Musk, 49, is a philanthropy neophyte compared with those he just leapfrogged on the Bloomberg ranking of the world’s 500 wealthiest people.

Despite signing the Giving Pledge, Mr Musk has done relatively little publicly in the way of charity. He’s donated more than $257m to the Musk Foundation, equivalent to about 0.1 per cent of his current net worth, which in turn distributed $65m between 2016 and 2018 to about 200 non-profits, according to an analysis by Quartz.

By turning to social media to solicit input on philanthropy, Mr Musk is following in the path of Mr Bezos, who asked his followers on Twitter for suggestions on charitable giving in 2017.

Mr Musk’s focus on carbon capture is in line with his other business interests, which largely focus on technological solutions to urgent environmental problems.

Carbon capture and storage is a mix of different technologies, which all share one goal: trapping carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas that’s warming the planet, and stopping it from being dumped in the atmosphere. It can be installed to capture emissions from power plants, industry or even directly from the air.

There are about two dozen large scale plants around the world, which can capture about 40 million metric tonnes of CO2 each year, about 0.1 per cent of the global annual total.

Mr Musk has indicated that the reason he’s accumulating wealth is to give it away, or at least redirect it to his passion projects, namely, space exploration. “It’s going to take a lot of resources to build a city on Mars,” he told German publisher Axel Springer. “I want to be able to contribute as much as possible.”