Bill Gates Rebranded Himself a Philanthropist. What Would It Look Like for Elon Musk to Do the Same?

A SpaceX launch at Kennedy Space Center in Florida. John Huntington/shutterstock

Like it or not, the actions and opinions of the world’s wealthiest person matter when you’re talking about philanthropy. That certainly held true for longtime title-holder Bill Gates, who built up the largest foundation on the planet, spearheaded the Giving Pledge, and pretty much set the tone for stratosphere-level giving over the past two decades.

Given his preponderance, it’s no wonder Gates came to represent the conventional wisdom about how the biggest donors operate — for instance, that they wait until they’re less involved in business to ramp up their giving. Or that they pledge to give away a large chunk of their wealth, maybe even all of it. Or, despite those pledges, that they tend to deploy their philanthropy cautiously and deliberately and hold a lot of spending power in reserve, often mirroring their habits in the private sector.

Elon Musk, currently the world’s richest person, cuts a very different figure than Gates today. He’s brash where Gates is measured. Musk trolls on Twitter while Gates holds forth via carefully crafted letters. Musk appears to have little regard for traditional philanthropy while Gates seems to consider it the most important thing a wealthy person can do with their money.

And yet, despite contrasting personas, today’s richest man has much in common with yesterday’s.

One of the mantles Musk has taken up is the embattled capitalist, aggrieved but immensely self-assured, convinced that what’s good for his business is good for society at large. It’s easy to forget — especially for those of us who were too young to pay attention — that Gates once wore a similar mantle. Before Bill Gates the philanthropist, there was Bill Gates the monopolist, petulantly defending Microsoft’s domineering business model before Congress and embodying all the qualities one might expect of a digital-age robber baron.

Just like Gates back then, Musk is still very much involved in business. If conventional philanthropic wisdom holds, that means he’ll wait until he’s older before turning to philanthropy in earnest. Musk has signed the Giving Pledge (unlike Jeff Bezos, notably), but like most signatories, the growth of his wealth has far outpaced his progress toward fulfilling it.

Where Musk has given, he’s done so in a relatively modest and nonstrategic way. One of his biggest recent pledges with an actual grantee attached — $50 million for St. Jude — wasn’t anything terribly groundbreaking, despite the fact that it coincided with a rocket launch. And Musk’s largest philanthropic commitment so far, a $5.6 billion mystery gift unveiled in a tax filing last year, hasn’t made it into the hands of any grantee we know of (it’s most likely sitting in a donor-advised fund).

All those differences aside, when it comes down to it, the biggest gap between Gates and Musk might simply be one of age. The boomer Gates has been around longer than the Gen X Musk, and Gates used that time to completely rebrand himself from domineering monopolist to beneficent philanthropist. Only now, in the wake of the Epstein scandal, COVID and the Gateses’ divorce, is the Bill Gates brand backsliding toward its previously tarnished state.

Divorces aside, Jeff Bezos, another contender for the title of world’s richest, seems keen to follow Gates’ basic trajectory, stepping back from his day-to-day role at Amazon and ramping up his giving in a major way through the Bezos Earth Fund and other outlets.

But where does that leave Elon Musk?

Here’s one way he’s articulated his position: “If you care about the reality of doing good and not the perception of doing good, then it is very hard to give away money effectively. I care about reality. Perception be damned.” That was Musk in a fairly recent interview, appearing to toss aside reputation-laundering as a motive force for his philanthropy. 

Indeed, Musk has often struck a dismissive and even disdainful tone toward traditional philanthropy. His infamous Twitter trolling of World Food Programme Director David Beasley is the most notable recent example of that, but I’d also point to the comical brevity of the Musk Foundation website. Compare that to Musk’s daily (hourly?) barrage of questionable commentary on Twitter, and to the $44 billion he’s paying for the site, and it seems pretty clear where his priorities lie.

But despite all that, there’s a case to be made for Musk the future philanthropist. If we take him at his word, Elon’s a proponent of a broad concept of philanthropy as “love of humanity,” one of the very few stances he shares with MacKenzie Scott. But where Scott says she finds that love of humanity in everyday donors and mutual aid givers, Musk says he finds it in for-profit companies — specifically, his own.

“SpaceX, Tesla, Neuralink, the Boring Company are philanthropy. If you say philanthropy is love of humanity, they are philanthropy,” Musk insisted in the same conversation referenced above.

The notion of “doing well by doing good” (or vice versa) isn’t exactly new. It has long animated the impact investing and venture philanthropy spaces, and continues to do so. But to have the world’s richest person articulate that position so bluntly is a major departure from the traditional formulation in which the super-rich, Gates included, clearly distinguish between their for-profit and nonprofit enterprises, and describe the latter in terms of “giving back” (were they “taking” before?).

The thing is, as predictably insufferable as Musk’s position on doing good by doing well may be, he’s not necessarily wrong. Tesla, in particular, may end up being a net good for humanity on the climate front — as long as other actions accompany vehicular electrification. And if we humor Musk’s logic (again), a reinvigorated space industry isn’t necessarily the worst long-shot investment toward “preserving the light of consciousness” — by which one assumes he means keeping the species going should some planet-altering cataclysm occur. As for Musk’s purchase of Twitter, it’s harder to see how that advances the good of humanity. But Musk clearly seems to believe it will. In other words, we can (and probably should) take issue with his attitude and execution, but there at least seems to be a Gates-like impulse in there somewhere.

Through it all, Musk appears to be leaning toward a kind of effective altruist stance, one that’s been more clearly articulated by other billionaires. But with Musk’s inconceivable fortune brought to bear, tech-forward effective altruism may come to vie with Gates’ more traditional, strategic approach and Scott’s no-strings, progressive approach in the battle for the future of philanthropy.

The point isn’t that Musk should be given philanthropic props for becoming the richest person in the world, or even for what he does with that money, necessarily. Many will attest that the dominance of the Gates Foundation is not exactly a happy ending for humanity. It’s that just as Bill Gates revamped his reputation by bridging the gap between 20th-century legacy foundations and the new Gilded Age of modern mega-donors, today’s apex donors will make their mark by bridging the gap between Gates and something else. And while it’s currently easy to dismiss Musk as a serious philanthropist, his immense fortune and future whims could lead him to dramatically shift the philanthropic and nonprofit landscape.

Elon Musk and MacKenzie Scott represent two visions of how future philanthropic norms might pan out, but they’re not the only ones. From Jack Dorsey to Laurene Powell Jobs to Sam Bankman-Fried, unconventional philanthropy is becoming a convention. Each billionaire’s approach will win them proponents, but as we’re seeing with Gates, the reputations thus built are never set in stone.

One of the biggest questions going forward is one of reputational longevity. If and when their names sit alongside Rockefeller and Carnegie in the annals of big-donor philanthropy, which of today’s apex donors will be seen as products of their time, bound up in the concerns of their time? And which will be seen as pioneering forerunners of whatever form of philanthropy comes after this new Gilded Age? Place your bets.