Elon Musk was told by the United Nations that 2% of his net worth could end world hunger and here’s why this made the UN look really bad.
Elon Musk with Tesla’s recent surge is worth about 300 billion dollars.
There was a claim that went viral from former South Carolina governor David Beasley who is the director of the United Nations program addressing global hunger issues.
Currently, 811 million people are hungry according to the United Nations, which is about 10% of the world.
To make this clear, 6 billion dollars spread across 811 million is is $7.39.
That would not cover breakfast and lunch at McDonalds, let alone long term hunger issues.
And for the record, 811 million is the high end of the global hunger estimate.
Most groups put the current number around 673 million, which is down 160 million from the year 2000 at 833 million.
Which to show how cool that is, the global population in 2000 was 6 billion people, but today stands at 7.8 billion.
Meaning we increased the global population by 30%, but saw a reduction in hunger in the process.
This is a good thing and I’m sure some UN efforts helped this, but the case 6 billion dollars would solve global hunger is just insane.
Making it worse, charitable donations going to hunger globally are estimated to be at around 265 billion.
A 6 billion dollar Musk donation wouldn’t even be a 2.5% increase to that, but the man in charge of the United Nations program on hunger couldn’t realize that.
Writing this, there’s not really much to say.
Hunger issues globally are declining, 6 billion dollars on this problem is everyone getting a foot long subway sandwich and David Beasley made a complete joke of himself.
But there is something which I think is important which is this bringing up the issue of people underestimating problems online.
I remember in 2020 hearing something along the lines of “20 billion dollars can end homelessness forever” from Bernie Sanders.
Didn’t factor in the expensive locations most homeless people are in such as NYC, LA & Hawaii.
Didn’t factor in sad facts with homelessness such as mental health and drug issues.
Didn’t factor in long term housing maintenance.
It was just this blind tweet that was shared by millions of people and likely came from someone about as credible as David Beasley, that just spread bad info.
The federal budget in 2019 was 4.4 trillion dollars.
Clearly, if issues such as homelessness, poverty and hunger were as simple as 2% of the budget, they’d be solved by now. This is just common sense.
Sometimes articles from big sources overstate a story and read from both Bloomberg & NY Times the claim that this guy said 2% can end hunger.
Had some comments point out he said 6 billion could address a current hunger issue for 43 million people.
Wanted to look at that and while much better, it’s still bad.
43 million people getting 6 billion would only be about $150 per person and watching the interview, it’d cover a hunger goal that only exist for about 60-90 days.
The claim of asking a person to give up 2% of his net worth that clearly exists due to an unrealistic stock rise is insane and Beasley already has raised 8 billion for this one issue.
It’s obviously not as bad as the previous one, but still pretty awful.
