The World's Richest Man Gives Away Less Than You Do

Elon Musk ended 2024 worth $442.1bn. That year his foundation gave $43.7m to charities with no tie to him, his family or his company towns. For a typical American family, worth $215,900, the same share of its wealth is $21.34.

Most of the rest never left his circle. $369.95m went to a Texas “school” run by Musk’s family office. In its year to June 2025 the school took in 1,174,780 Tesla shares worth $407.3m, spent $767,579 and sold none of them. Musk deducted the full market value of those shares when he gave them to his foundation, and the public covers the tax he did not pay. The foundation meets its legal duty to give money away by handing the stock to a second charity that never has to spend it.

The 2024 return shows how much moves this way. The $369.95m to The Foundation, a nonprofit registered as a school, and $35m to a Fidelity Charitable donor-advised fund add up to $405m, or 85% of the year’s giving. It is not a one-year pattern. The Economist found that 58% of the roughly $1bn the foundation disbursed in 2020-24 went to The Foundation, and about a tenth went to Fidelity Charitable. The grants to the school keep growing: $10m in 2022 and $100m in 2023, then $369.95m in 2024.

Musk and his brother Kimbal founded the Musk Foundation in 2001. Its officers, according to the 990-PF, are Musk and two employees of his family office, Jared Birchall and Matilda Simon. Nearly all of its money is Tesla stock, and the two returns show the stock moving in five steps:

Musk gives Tesla shares to the foundation. He pays no capital-gains tax on stock that cost him close to nothing, and he deducts its full market value from his income. His 2021 gift of 5,044,000 shares, worth about $5.7bn, came in the same year he sold $16bn of Tesla stock. The tax code caps deductions for gifts of stock at 30% of income, and Steve Latham, writing in Bloomberg Tax, observed that “it appears he donated exactly 30% of his AGI for the year.” The gift was sized to the maximum deduction. His Tesla gifts came to about $8bn in 2021-22. ProPublica’s records of the foundation’s filings show $5.70bn received in 2021 and $2.25bn in 2022.
The shares sit and grow. At the end of 2024 the foundation carried its Tesla stock at about $5.7m, which is what the shares cost on its books. Their market value was $14.08bn, out of total assets of $14.73bn.
The law asks for one thing in return. A private foundation must pay out about 5% of its assets each year, and the foundation’s own return calculates that required amount in Part XII.
The payout goes to a “school.” The Foundation’s own return declares it a school under section 170(b)(1)(A)(ii) of the tax code. That makes it a public charity, and public charities have no payout rule.
The school holds the stock. It does not have to spend the money, and the Musk Foundation still counts it as given.

The deduction is taken at full market value, the payout rule is met by moving the same shares to a second entity the family office runs, and the shares are never sold and never leave his people’s control.

The other $35m went to a donor-advised fund, which works like a charity account: a sponsor holds the money, and the people who put it in recommend where it goes later. The 990-PF answers yes to the question of whether the foundation or a “disqualified person” had advisory privileges over the fund. A disqualified person is the tax code’s term for insiders such as founders and managers.

Musk gives Tesla shares to his foundation, receives a tax deduction, and the foundation transfers shares to The Foundation and cash to Fidelity Charitable, while the public bears the forgone tax.

The size of the public’s share depends on whose estimate you use. Latham, who founded the stock-gifting company DonateStock, estimated that the 2021 gift could have saved Musk $4.58bn, about 80% of its value. His figure assumes California’s 12.3% rate on top of federal rates. A New York Times analysis in March 2024 put the avoided capital-gains tax at up to $2bn. Latham was not writing as a critic. His piece ends with advice to readers:

“Be like Elon Musk, give smart and save more by donating stock this year.”, Steve Latham, Bloomberg Tax

Even on these terms the foundation runs late. In 2024, $421.8m of its $474.3m payout went to clear what it still owed for 2023. It ended the year owing $393.6m that “must be distributed in 2025.” The law gives a foundation until the end of the following year before a 30% excise tax applies, and Musk’s has leaned on that grace period year after year: The New York Times (December 2024) and Bloomberg have reported shortfalls in 2021, 2022 and 2023, and The Economist puts the current amount owed at about $400m.

$780 million for a school of about 50

The Foundation runs Ad Astra, a Montessori school in Bastrop County, Texas, according to the Texas Tribune’s January 2025 reporting; its own return records $85,100 in tuition. Ad Astra began on SpaceX’s California campus, where 5 of the 14 original pupils were Musk’s children. That school closed in 2020 after they left. According to KXAN, the Bastrop site is a former 40-acre horse ranch in the same area as Boring Company operations, with a planned capacity “just shy of 50”: 18 primary pupils and 30 lower-elementary pupils.

The Ad Astra school site in Bastrop, Texas.

The Economist wrote this week that it was “unclear” what The Foundation does with its money. The school’s return answers the question: it keeps it. It reports three employees and $732.6m in securities, with no sales recorded. Net assets rose from $269.9m to $779.8m in one year, and $101.4m of that increase was unrealised gains on stock it had not sold.

The school’s three filings tell the same story. Spending was $25,385, $85,557 and $767,579 in fiscal 2023, 2024 and 2025. Over the same period it took in more than $640m, so it spent about 0.14% of what came in.

Measured against an actual school, the money cannot be used up:

At $767,579 a year, $779.8m would last more than 1,000 years.
Interest and dividends of $1.83m were more than twice total spending.
The one-year paper gain of $101.4m was 132 times total spending.
Divided across 48 seats, the holdings come to about $16.2m per child.

New York spends more per public-school pupil than any other state: $31,918 in fiscal 2024, according to the Census Bureau’s May 2026 release. At that rate, one Ad Astra seat’s share would pay for about 509 years of schooling. Educating all 48 children for a year would cost about $1.53m, roughly 0.2% of what The Foundation holds.

The two entities are run from the same office. The Musk Foundation’s return and The Foundation’s both list PO Box 341886, Austin, and the phone number (737) 235-6956. Both were prepared by Catalyst Family Office, and its preparer, Ronald Gong, is also The Foundation’s secretary. Jared Birchall, who heads Musk’s family office, is president of The Foundation and treasurer of the Musk Foundation. The Foundation’s return describes its trustees as independent, and its own Schedule O states that “two of the trustees are business partners.”

This is a stock account with a school attached.

What reached charities outside Musk’s orbit

According to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, Musk was worth $442.1bn at the end of 2024, up $213bn in the year. The Federal Reserve’s 2025 Survey of Consumer Finances, released on October 9th, puts the typical (median) American family’s net worth at $215,900.

The table takes each of the foundation’s 2024 grants as a share of Musk’s wealth and applies the same share to that typical family:

2024 gift from the Musk Foundation	The same as a typical American donating
Everything to charities with no tie to Musk, his family or his company towns: $43.7m	$21.34
Austin Habitat for Humanity: $5m	$2.44
GiveDirectly: $1.4m	68 cents
Feeding America: $1.25m	61 cents
The entire $474.3m payout, his own entities included	$232

Make-A-Wish’s $500,000 works out to 24 cents. Girls in Robotics received $10,000, which is half a cent. A family that puts $25 a year into a collection plate gives more, in proportion, than the richest man in the world gave to unconnected charities.

The table leaves out the stock Musk moved into his own foundation: $5.70bn in 2021, $2.25bn in 2022 and $73.9m in 2024. It is excluded because those shares never left his people’s control.

The arrangement has a history. In October 2021, World Food Programme chief David Beasley tweeted that a sixth of Musk’s one-day wealth gain would help 42 million people facing famine. Musk replied:

“If WFP can describe on this Twitter thread exactly how $6B will solve world hunger, I will sell Tesla stock right now and do it.”

Beasley posted the arithmetic: “$.43 x 42,000,000 x 365 days = $6.6 billion,” enough for one meal a day for a year. On November 11th, NPR reported that Musk had made no commitment. Between November 19th and 29th, Musk gave 5,044,000 Tesla shares worth about $5.7bn, close to the sum WFP had requested, to his own foundation. It was the same gift Latham’s estimate covers, sized to the deduction cap in the year he sold $16bn of Tesla stock. Bloomberg did not reveal where it went until December 2022, under the headline “Musk’s $5.7 Billion Mystery Gift Went to His Own Charity.”

World Food Programme workers distributing food aid to people in need.

Musk’s position, according to Walter Isaacson’s 2023 biography, is that he can do more for humanity by keeping his money in his companies. These shares are not working in his companies. He took them out of his own hands for a deduction, and they now sit in a brokerage account at a 48-pupil school. He has called philanthropy “bullshit”, and in August he agreed that many charities are “net negative.”

Musk spends quickly when he wants to. Since July he has given more than $276m to Republican groups ahead of the midterms.

The $393.6m it still owed for 2024 had to be paid out by the end of 2025. The foundation’s 2025 return is due next month, and the last one showed where the money goes: back to Musk.