First: Buying an asset isn’t consumption, it’s just conversion, so it doesn’t actually use up the money. Indeed, all the cash went to other people (shareholders), and they can elect to do generous things with it if they wish.
Second, he was able to do that because he was able to borrow against the asset, which he couldn’t do by giving away money.
But most of all, of course just intuitively from common sense, such a small amount of money can’t end global hunger, right? If so, it would have been done long ago. And it’s clear how little money that is and how little it can do.
The reference is to an ill-stated claim he was responding to that concerned the one-year needs of a particular food program. Certainly an admirable thing to spend on, but far from ending global hunger.
The primary cause of global hunger, by a large margin, is socio-political, not financial. Most true starvation (which outside of what’s about to happen in Gaza may surprise you as lower than you thought, though anything is awful) is deliberately imposed as a political act.
Food insecurity, also a big problem, exists even in places of great wealth such as the U.S. It can’t be eradicated by writing a one-time $1 check for every human.
Alas.
And of course, capital allocation is a great moral responsibility. Objectively speaking, as an individual if you had Elon’s social capital and skillset, allocating large amounts of your capital to ending hunger would be a bad move. There is much greater good you could do with it, especially considering the marginal utility of your donation compared with the small opportunity cost others who are also forgoing the contribution have elected to avoid. The world is capable of giving $6b easily, so the fact that it doesn’t shows it doesn’t value the benefit much. If this is a moral failure — I would agree it probably is — then the money is best spent on a leveraged way to address the moral failing, not the final goal itself.
Perhaps wrong, Elon thought the best way was to champion or “rescue” a global libertarian speech town square for the purpose of uncontrolled information flow. This may have been wrong or naive but it isn’t having your heart in the wrong place.