Elon Musk Donated $474 Million In 2024, Largely Towards Entities He Controls

Elon Musk's foundation gave away a record $474 million in 2024, with the vast majority again going to entities he controls. 

The Musk Foundation sent about $370 million to the Foundation, a nonprofit he set up to establish a STEM-focused primary and secondary school, according to a new tax filing. Another $35 million went to a donor-advised fund at Fidelity Charitable. The remainder of the gifts went to a slew of other nonprofits - some repeat recipients, others new to the billionaire - including groups focused on health care, disaster relief and education. 

In total, Musk's foundation had $14.7 billion in assets last year, up 55% from 2023. Musk and Jared Birchall, who runs his family office and is listed as an employee of the foundation, didn't immediately respond to a request for comment.

Among other gifts, Musk gave $2.1 million to the Scroll Prize, which runs a challenge to decode the Herculaneum scrolls buried by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in the year AD 79. Luke Farritor, one of the so-called DOGE kids who helped the billionaire run the Department of Government Efficiency, won the challenge last year. 

He also made gifts to the Holocaust Museum LA and the European Jewish Association. Early in the year, he visited the site of Auschwitz-Birkenau, one of the largest Nazi concentration camps, after he was accused of allowing antisemitic messages on X. 

Musk has tended to direct his giving toward entities he effectively controls, including to various donor-advised funds, a philanthropic tool that allows contributors to get the tax break associated with charitable activity before making donations to actual working charities. Since 2016, he has sent roughly $175 million to DAFs he controls at Fidelity Charitable and Vanguard Charitable. 

Although Musk has signed the Giving Pledge to donate the majority of his wealth during his lifetime or in his will, his philanthropic endeavors have so far been relatively small-scale compared with other billionaires like Warren Buffett or MacKenzie Scott. From 2021 to 2024, he disclosed giving away roughly $1 billion in total. Over that same period, his net worth has ballooned by hundreds of billions of dollars, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. 

Musk is the world's richest person with a net worth of $434.6 billion, according to Bloomberg's wealth index. 

Still, the scale of his wealth has allowed his foundation to dwarf other well-known philanthropic organizations. Even in 2023, with $9.5 billion in assets, it was larger than family foundations that are decades older, including the Rockefeller Foundation, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

While other large private philanthropies typically have hundreds or even thousands of employees, the Musk Foundation operates with a small staff. This year, it named just three employees on its tax return, including Musk, Birchall and Matilda Simon, who is listed as a director.

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