Elon Musk mocks Bill Gates: "I can't take your philanthropy seriously!"
Tesla CEO Elon Musk said he had confronted billionaire Bill Gates about whether or not he was selling Tesla stock.
And it seems that this was at the grand opening ceremony of the Tesla Giga Texas company to manufacture “Cyber Rodeo” on April 7, 2022, Musk launched in his tweet this morning a sharp attack on Bill Gates, and mocked him.
The Tesla CEO admitted that he asked Gates "if he's short selling shares of the electric car maker. When investors sell shares, they are betting that the price of the asset will fall."
"I heard from several people that Gates still has half a billion dollars worth of Tesla stock, which is why I asked him, so it's not so secret," Musk said in his tweet.
Elon Musk was responding to a question from one of his Twitter followers about whether the leaked image of an assumed text conversation with Gates was real, and the Tesla CEO replied, “Yes, but I did not leak it to the New York Times.
They must have gotten it through friends of friends."
In the circulating image, which cannot be independently verified, Musk asked Gates: "Do you still have a short position of half a billion dollars in Tesla?"
Gates replied, "I'm sorry I didn't close it. I'd like to discuss the possibilities for philanthropy."
"Sorry, I can't take your philanthropy seriously when you have a massive short position against Tesla, the company that is doing everything it can to contribute to solving climate change," Musk replied.
A spokesman for Bill Gates was not immediately available for comment when contacted by the American network "CNBC", according to a report seen by Al-Arabiya.net.
"It's important to say that what Elon did with Tesla is one of the greatest contributions to the fight against climate change ever," Gates told New York Times opinion writer Kara Swisher last year.
But he added that what Tesla did were "easy things, like passenger cars".
Gates stressed the need to make a greater impact on climate change by tackling other industries.
"We basically don't do enough things with regard to steel, cement and meat," he said at the time.
"Unfortunately, the things people think about - electricity, passenger cars - are one-third of the problem. So we have to work on two-thirds."
This is not the first time that the two men have publicly disagreed.
In 2020, Gates revealed that he had bought himself an all-electric Porsche Taycan, and one Twitter user asked, "I wonder why Bill Gates decided to go with the Taycan instead of the Tesla."
"My conversations with Gates have been confusing," Musk replied in a tweet.
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