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0 pointszirobi3y ago0 comments

They were incredibly disingenuous about the Elon Musk thing.

He said he'd sell $6bn of Tesla stock and donate it if they could provide an open source plan to completely solve world hunger.

They said they'd written a private plan to reduce world hunger then criticised him for not making the donation.

Whatever you think of Elon, I don't think he acted in bad faith here.

0 comments

notahacker3y ago

No, Elon responded saying that if they could describe exactly how world hunger could be solved "on this Twitter thread" he would donate $6bn. Nothing to do with "open source", everything to do with making the request undeliverable (UN staff did of course tweet links to already-too-long-for-Twitter UN documents at him)

raspberry13373y ago

Considering the "plan" is a table with a list of countries and corresponding numbers that could easily fit on one image (who could have known it was this easy!), its actually very possible to fit into a twitter thread: https://www.wfp.org/stories/wfps-plan-support-42-million-peo...

In fact, a high schooler could have done the same job of multiplying x_starving_ppl_in_country * y_cost_of_food_one_year_per_person, so its quite suprising that it took them all this time to counter with their genius, open source plan

2000UltraDeluxe3y ago

Definitely not. Musk did not ask for anything outrageous in return for the money. It was a PR disaster from the UN's point of view. Perhaps their perception of the risk of calling Elon Musk out like that was broken?

ben_w3y ago

While I was less than impressed by what I saw, I think calling it “a PR disaster” overstates the impact. I observed people reading into both parties what I already know they wanted to believe about each of Musk and the UN.

2000UltraDeluxe3y ago

Don't get me wrong; I normally don't like Musk's antics. However, we _know_ we can't end world hunger with 6 billion USD. At best, we can solve some urgent crisis, but an actual long-term solution requires more than billionaires flinging money at the problem.

Beasley knew this when he opened his mouth.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse

0 pointszirobi3y ago0 comments

They were incredibly disingenuous about the Elon Musk thing.

He said he'd sell $6bn of Tesla stock and donate it if they could provide an open source plan to completely solve world hunger.

They said they'd written a private plan to reduce world hunger then criticised him for not making the donation.

Whatever you think of Elon, I don't think he acted in bad faith here.

0 comments

notahacker3y ago

raspberry13373y ago

2000UltraDeluxe3y ago

ben_w3y ago

2000UltraDeluxe3y ago

Beasley knew this when he opened his mouth.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse