New York, Europe Brief News – The world’s richest man, Elon Musk, has donated nearly $2bn ($1.95bn) worth of shares in his electric carmaker to charity last year.
The donation of 11.6 million shares was described in a filing with US regulators as “a bona fide gift”.
The filing did not name the recipient, or recipients, of the donation.
Also on Wednesday, Mr Musk said that towards the end of this year would be a “good time” to find someone to succeed him as the chief executive of Twitter.
The document lodged with the US Securities and Exchange Commission showed the donation was made between August and December last year.
It is not the first time Elon Musk has given Tesla stock to charity. He donated around $5.74bn worth of shares in 2021, according to a regulatory filing.
He also said on Twitter that year, that he planned to donate $20m to schools in Cameron County and $10m to the city of Brownsville in Texas for “downtown revitalization”.
Since Mr Musk bought the social media site in October, he has fired about half of its staff and attempted a rollout of Twitter’s paid-for verification feature before putting it on pause. The feature was relaunched last week.
Civil liberties groups have also criticised his approach to content moderation, accusing him of taking steps that will increase hate speech and misinformation.
On Friday, the UN and EU condemned Musk over Twitter’s decision to suspend some social media journalists.
The UN tweeted that media freedom was “not a toy”, while the EU threatened Twitter with sanctions.
