Elon Musk to give $100m to whoever creates best carbon capture system

Tesla chief Elon Musk has promised to pledge the money to the technology

Credit: AFP

Elon Musk has said he plans to donate $100m (£73m) to whoever can come up with the best carbon capture system, just weeks after he became the world’s richest person.

The Tesla chief executive, who has leapfrogged Amazon’s Jeff Bezos in the wealth rankings, said more details on his plan to back the tech would come next week.

The South African-born entrepreneur is now valued at around $201.4bn, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.

The 49-year-old has long spoken about the need to safeguard the planet from climate change. However, to date, much of the response to global warming has been focused on cutting emissions rather than taking carbon out of the air.

Carbon capture and storage technology (CCS) aims to take carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and store it in safe locations, such as underground.

Am donating $100M towards a prize for best carbon capture technology

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) January 21, 2021

High cost has often provided a barrier to entry for the technology but there are a collection of companies already operating CCS technology. 

Last year, the International Energy Agency said that a rapid roll-out of carbon capture tech was needed for countries to meet their net-zero targets.

Beyond Tesla, Musk also heads up a raft of high-tech companies, including rocket company SpaceX and brain-machine interface company Neuralink.

One of his first reactions on becoming the wealthiest human was to solicit advice on how to give it away.

Despite signing the Giving Pledge, Musk has done relatively little publicly in the way of charity. He’s donated more than $257m to the Musk Foundation — equivalent to about 0.1pc of his current net worth — which in turn distributed $65m between 2016 and 2018 to about 200 nonprofits, according to an analysis by Quartz.

Musk has indicated that the reason he’s accumulating wealth is to give it away, or at least redirect it to his passion projects, namely, space exploration. “It’s going to take a lot of resources to build a city on Mars,” he told German publisher Axel Springer. “I want to be able to contribute as much as possible.”