World’s richest man, Elon Musk has confirmed how he rejected working with Bill Gates on climate change via text because the Microsoft co-founder was shorting Tesla.
According to reports, the two billionaires had been set to meet somewhere. But in the texts, Musk asked Gates if he still had a “half-billion-dollar short position against Tesla.”
After Gates replied and said “Sorry to say I haven’t closed it yet,” adding he would like for them to rather discuss philanthropic possibilities, Musk replied that he can’t take Gates’ philanthropy on climate change seriously when he had a massive short position against Tesla, the company doing the most to solve climate change.
Read also: Twitter bans misleading ads on climate change
On Friday night, the SpaceX billionaire confirmed the veracity of a screenshot of the text exchange which was posted by @WholeMarsBlog who wrote “No idea if this is true lol” and asked Musk about it.
“Yeah,” Musk answered, “but I didn’t leak it to NYT. They must have got it through friends of friends. I heard from multiple people at TED that Gates still had half-billion short against Tesla, which is why I asked him, so it’s not exactly top secret.”
Musk was also reported to have trolled Gates with a vulgar tweet comparing a photo of his to a pregnant man emoji. He did not however say when the exchange happened and it wasn’t clear where the screenshot originated.
At the time of this report, Gates was yet to publicly comment on the texts. The two businessmen have been at odds in the past.
Story was adapted from Fox Business.
