Musk may very well reject the data, but there are enough wealthy people & foundations (Gates etc.) and $6B small enough an amount that it wouldn't be hard to raise the money.
Heck, the UN WFP's own annual budget is about $9B. You'd think that amount of money would allow them to solve world hunger and still have $3B left over to respond to emergency situations etc.
WFP's accounting is usually highly suspect though. For example, a recent report on food waste reported about 900 million tons is wasted. But when you did into the details, they included inedible parts of food. That is a ridiculous methodology: I weighed a banana & its peel when I saw that, and it turns out that by that methodology banana peels alone would account for roughly 30 million tons of "waste". Add in orange peels and pineapple rinds and that's about another 20 million tons.
Maybe Musk wouldn't follow through, but a claim of $6B to solve a problem that has been intractable for decades seems like a ridiculous claim. If the WFP suddenly had a magic bullet solution like that, there would be plenty of people chipping in to help. Their lack of details on how they arrived at that number and how they would implement their plan if they had the money speaks for itself though.
Even If seems a little strong here. Musk's phrasing doesn't indicate that 'he really wants to be part of helping solve world hunger and that he just needs the data to make it happen'.
I think you're reading too much into my phrasing on that point when the rest of my comment is much more substantive on the topic: I agree that Musk's offer is very unlikely to be genuine though, so I'll edit it to "Musk may very well..." to remove the potential distraction from what I wrote afterwards.
Of course; this is a well-worn rhetorical technique for posturing to existing supporters without creating any real opening; its an extra plus if you can dupe people into wasting their time on it, but most targets are going to recognize it off the bat.
Note that the article he responded to with his tweet, it was $6B for a specific 42M person subset. Not ALL of world hunger. Musk inaccurately/incorrectly has ballooned the scope up to all world hunger.
I thought the headline was incredibly stupid at the time. They added a "correction" at the bottom of the page now:
>-- Correction: An earlier version of this story's headline incorrectly stated that the director of the UN's food scarcity organization believes 2% of Elon Musk's wealth could solve world hunger. He believes it could help solve world hunger.
>The UN says $6B from the world's billionaires could solve a hunger crisis. Elon Musk says he will sell Tesla stock and donate proceeds if the UN can prove that.
Are we arguing that news headlines are not the resposibility of news organizations?
Bear in mind, that headline is recent. Should we still go with Occam's razor here, or is this a clear attempt to get clicks, you know, given the fact that this headline came way after the correction but still commits the same "mistake" which is more click inducing than stating the facts ?
>By offering a broad correction that wasn't limited to the one-word CNN error, the whole of your post became non-factual.
> That's a CNN blunder that claimed that 2% of Elon Musk's wealth could solve world hunger
That's a blunder on the headline of the article, sure, but is the suggestion here that Elon whipped out that offer to liquidate $6B without reading the article itself or watching the interview on the topic? Direct quote from the interview where the UN rep was talking about it, which was also included in the original article:
"$6 billion to help 42 million people that are literally going to die if we don't reach them. It's not complicated"
> That's a blunder on the headline of the article, sure, but is the suggestion here that Elon whipped out that offer to liquidate $6B without reading the article itself or watching the interview on the topic?
Well, he certainly whipped it out to rhetorically appeal to people who hadn't read the article or watched the interview, whether or not he personally read/watched them.
> That's a blunder on the headline of the article, sure, but is the suggestion here that Elon whipped out that offer to liquidate $6B without reading the article itself or watching the interview on the topic?
Precisely. This is Musk front-loading technicalities into his blustery non-offer.
I like that Elon is asking for specific outcomes, even if the wording isnt exactly accurate. I imagine he runs his companies the in similar ways. You can see how defensive the UN is getting when asked for detailed outcome based plans, vs lofty statements with vague outcomes like ‘prevent geopolitical instability’.
I was thinking along the same lines: $6B seems exceptionally low to the point that, if true, they wouldn't have much philanthropic difficulty in getting the $ to make it happen. However in the past I have found UNWFP's logic and methodology behind their #'s and statements to be much less than rigorous.
> UN World Food Programme (WFP) director David Beasley challenged the ultra-wealthy — and in particular the world's two richest men Jeff Bezos and Musk — to "step up now, on a one-time basis" to help solve world hunger in an interview with CNN last week.
> "$6 billion will not solve world hunger, but it WILL prevent geopolitical instability, mass migration and save 42 million people on the brink of starvation. An unprecedented crisis and a perfect storm due to Covid/conflict/climate crises," he [David Beasley] added.
The use of "Exactly" seems designed to grant enough wiggle room, for Musk to dismiss even the most conclusive data.
Musk also seems to be dismissing the stated goal of "helping solve world hunger" in favor of the misstatement - 'solve world hunger'.