Elon Musk: “Am donating $100M towards a prize for best carbon capture technology”
Tesla CEO Elon Musk has decided to donate $100 million as a reward for the best carbon capture technology. He tweeted about this on 22 January, 2021.
Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, became the richest man on earth on 7th January 2021 as his net worth reached $185Bn. Tesla, Musk’s electric car manufacturing company has grown in valuation this year and for the first time achieved a market value of $700 billion.
Elon is known for his cryptic tweets. Recently Elon tweeted and asked people to use Signal when WhatsApp changed it’s privacy policy which allows it to share user data with its parent company Facebook. Anyway, that’s a different argument.
The SpaceX CEO wrote on Twitter that he is going to donate $100 million as a prize money for the ‘best carbon capture technology’ and he will made the details public soon.
Am donating $100M towards a prize for best carbon capture technology
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) January 21, 2021
Details next week
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) January 21, 2021
The tweet has been retweeted more than 35K times already and the number is growing.
Elon has been known for his efforts on Carbon Free technologies. However, we can’t confirm how it works for SpaceX while launching a rocket. There may be no option for that. People are commenting on this announcement of Elon’s thanking him for being generous and organizing such a competition. Elon has already made some efforts to lower carbon emission through his company Solar City which provides solar rooftops and installs them on houses. Elon’s company Solar City claims that a household can be totally self sufficient in terms of electric power with their solar rooftops and services.
We hope entrepreneurs will will soon come up with a better carbon capturing technology as compared to those we already have in present time.
Elon Musk and His Efforts For a Carbon Free Society: Solar City
Musk supplied SolarCity with the original idea and financial capital, which was co-founded in 2006 by his cousins, Lyndon and Peter Rive. By 2013, SolarCity was the United States’ second largest supplier of solar power systems. Musk revealed in 2012 that SolarCity and Tesla would work together to use batteries from electric cars to smooth the effect of solar rooftops on the power grid, with the initiative going live in 2013.
In June 2014, in Buffalo, New York, Musk committed to developing an innovative SolarCity manufacturing facility that would triple the size of the largest solar plant in the United States. The facility will be “one of the single largest solar panel production plants in the world,” Musk said, and will be preceded in subsequent years by one or two much larger facilities.
The Tesla Gigafactory 2 is a photovoltaic (PV) cell factory in Buffalo, New York, leased by Tesla’s SolarCity subsidiary. Construction began in 2014 on the factory and was finished in 2017. As part of the Buffalo Billion initiative, Tesla approved $750 million in public funds from New York Governor Andrew Cuomo to develop the factory and facilities, a proposal to spend capital to support the Buffalo, New York area economy. Until early 2020, the factory was owned as a joint venture with Panasonic.
In 2016, Tesla purchased SolarCity for over $2 billion and turned it into its solar division; the disclosure of the acquisition resulted in Tesla’s stock price falling by more than 10 percent. SolarCity was facing liquidity problems at the time; Tesla shareholders were not aware, however.
As a result, numerous shareholder associations have filed a lawsuit against the directors of Musk and Tesla, alleging that the acquisition of SolarCity was made purely to Musk’s advantage and came at the detriment of Tesla and its shareholders. Musk admitted during a court deposition in June 2019 that the company reallocated every potential employee from the solar sector to operate on Model 3, and “as a result, solar suffered.” according to Musk.
This was not previously revealed to shareholders. Court papers unsealed in 2019 have verified that Musk was aware of the liquidity difficulties of the company as well. In January 2020, Tesla administrators settled the case, leaving Musk as the only surviving defendant.