Billionaire Elon Musk confirmed that he turned down a meeting with Bill Gates to talk about philanthropy after discovering that the Microsoft co-founder had “short positions” against Tesla – an investment that bets on a company’s shares to fall.
The announcement came after the New York Times published screenshots showing the exchange of messages between the two entrepreneurs. After being confronted by a user on Twitter last Friday (22), Musk confirmed that the images were true.
“Yeah, but I didn’t leak it to the NYT. They must have gotten it through friends of friends. I heard from several people at TED that Gates still had half a billion [em investimentos] against Tesla, which is why I asked him, so it’s not exactly secret.”
From the leaked images, you can see that Musk confirms the date and time of the meeting suggested by Bill Gates, responding with a “Great”. In another message, the Tesla owner then asks if he still had US$ 1 billion (R$ 4.73 billion) betting on the company’s devaluation.
“I am sorry to say that I have not closed [o investimento]”, responds Gates. “I would like to discuss possibilities for philanthropy,” he adds.
Musk then responds: “Sorry, I can’t take your climate change philanthropy seriously when you have a huge short position against Tesla, the company that does the most to solve climate change.”
On the same day, the billionaire also mocked the appearance of Gates in a publication in which he compares him to the pregnant man emoji – just released by Apple. “In case you need to lose an erection fast,” he wrote.
In February 2021, Bill Gates praised and criticized Musk in an interview with the New York Times. At the time, the Microsoft co-founder pointed out that it was not a good idea to underestimate him.
“It’s important to say that what Elon did with Tesla is one of the biggest contributions to climate change that anyone has ever made,” he said.
However, Gates also went so far as to say that Tesla was making things easy and that it needed to act in a way to impact the climate crisis more, fighting other industries.
“Basically, we’re not doing enough on the hard stuff: steel, cement, meat,” he said. “And unfortunately, the things people think about — electricity, passenger cars — are one-third of the problem. So we have to work on the other two-thirds,” he added.
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