In 2022, Elon Musk gave $1.9 billion to charity

• Financial

Elon Musk, the world's second-richest person on Forbes' list of billionaires, reportedly donated $1.9 billion worth of Tesla stock to charity last year. Tesla's stock has struggled over the past year, with a crash in December wiping out nearly $900 billion in market valuation.

Musk also sold at least $22 billion worth of stock in 2022, and his donation of Tesla stock to charity will help reduce the taxes he owes on profits from selling those shares. Musk sold 7.9 million Tesla shares worth $6.9 billion in August, 19.5 million shares worth $3.9 billion in November 2022, and another 22 million shares worth worth $3.6 billion in December.

In 2021, Musk donated five million Tesla shares to charity, valued at $5.7 billion. The entrepreneur, who is worth $194 billion, now owns about 13% of Tesla.

Musk's other ambitious projects

According to the Financial Times, Elon Musk is interested in turning Twitter into a payment platform that can compete with Apple Pay and PayPal.

Musk is also working on the infrastructure of the new service and it seems that he wants to go one step further, transforming Twitter into an all-in-one platform, capable of offering many more services than the current ones.

Back in November last year, Musk partially detailed his plans to enter the payments market during a meeting with advertisers, anticipating plans to allow Twitter accounts to transfer money to others within the social network.

Musk would be interested in having services like peer-to-peer transactions, savings accounts and debit cards as part of a global plan to roll out a new application that can incorporate messaging, payments and commerce. The platform could become a direct competitor of PayPal and Apple Pay, since in addition to allowing online and in-store payment, it will also propose to offer money transfer services between users, and this will pave the way for other applications that for now we can only imagine.

The platform will work with standard currencies and payment methods before introducing cryptocurrency support. Meanwhile, Elon Musk testified in California in the trial that he is accused of a series of tweets in 2018 in which he claimed to have the necessary funds for the delisting of Tesla.

The lawsuit against Musk over his tweets was initiated by a shareholder and could cost him billions of dollars in damages if a jury finds him guilty. According to the suing shareholder, Musk did not have the funds to delist Tesla and acted recklessly in discussing the plan.