[zirobi]

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.

[notahacker]

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)

[raspberry1337]

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

[2000UltraDeluxe]

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_w]

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.

[2000UltraDeluxe]

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.