Originally published 2022-06-11.
In June 2022, Bill Gates told a French interviewer that he gives far more money to fighting climate change than Elon Musk does. The line was not a random boast. It was the latest round in a quarrel that had gone public two months earlier, when leaked text messages showed Musk refusing to work with Gates on climate philanthropy because Gates was betting against Tesla’s share price.
So who is right? The honest answer is that the two men are measuring different things. Gates is talking about donations and patient investment in clean-energy research. Musk is pointing to the companies he runs, which sell electric cars, batteries and solar products. Below is what each of them said, what a “short position” is, and how to think about the comparison without picking a side by reflex.
What Gates said in the HugoDécrypte interview
The comment came during a long interview with Hugo Travers, the young French journalist behind the popular news channel HugoDécrypte. Asked about Musk’s earlier criticism, Gates was generous about Tesla itself and then drew a sharp contrast between the two men’s giving. As Entrepreneur reported at the time, he said: “I give a lot more money to climate change than Elon Musk or anyone else.”
In the same answer Gates praised Musk’s work and argued that someone shorting the stock does nothing to slow Musk down or harm him. In other words, he presented his Tesla bet as a private investment decision with no effect on the electric-car maker, and his philanthropy as the thing that should be judged.
The clip spread on Twitter when Tesla investor Sawyer Merritt posted it with a sceptical comment and tagged Musk. Musk’s entire reply was a single weary word: a sigh.
NEWS: Bill Gates on Elon Musk & Tesla in new interview:
— Sawyer Merritt 📈🚀 (@SawyerMerritt) June 4, 2022
"Tesla's done a fantastic job; I give a lot more money to climate change than @elonmusk or anyone else; He's (Elon) done a great job, but somebody shorting the stock doesn't slow him down or hurt him in any way."
Ya….ok🥴 pic.twitter.com/sqOFlgbBgS
How the feud started: leaked texts in April 2022
The disagreement dates to late April 2022. Text messages between the two billionaires, reported by The New York Times and then widely shared online, showed Gates reaching out to Musk about working together on climate philanthropy. Musk first asked whether Gates still held a large short position against Tesla. When Gates said he had not closed it, Musk turned him down flatly: “Sorry, but I cannot take your philanthropy on climate change seriously when you have a massive short position against Tesla.”
When people asked about the leak, Musk said on Twitter that he had not given the messages to the newspaper himself and that the size of the short, around half a billion dollars, had been common talk among people at the TED conference.
Yeah, but I didn’t leak it to NYT. They must have got it through friends of friends.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 23, 2022
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’s logic was simple from his point of view. Tesla, he argued, was doing more than any other company to move the world off fossil fuels, so profiting from its decline looked to him like a contradiction for someone who campaigns on climate change.
What a short position is, and did Gates really hold one?
To “short” a stock means borrowing shares, selling them, and hoping to buy them back later at a lower price. If the price falls, the short seller keeps the difference. If it rises, the losses can be large, because there is no ceiling on how high a share price can climb.
Shorting is legal and common. Fund managers use it to hedge other holdings or to bet that a company is overvalued. Short sellers do not directly take money from the company, which still has the cash it raised when it sold its shares. That is the point Gates was making. Critics, Musk included, reply that heavy shorting can weigh on sentiment and that a public champion of clean energy betting against a clean-energy company sends a confusing signal.
For a while the short was a matter of leaked texts and rumour. That changed in September 2023, when Walter Isaacson’s biography of Musk was published. According to excerpts reported by The Register, Gates had lost about $1.5 billion on the bet at one point, and Isaacson wrote that Gates confirmed by text that he had not closed the position. Gates told Isaacson that Musk had been “super mean” to him once he heard about it. Gates’s own reported explanation was that he expected the supply of electric cars to outrun demand and push prices down, and when pressed he admitted the aim was to make money.
Comparing their climate spending fairly
Claims about who “gives more” only mean something when both sides use the same measure over the same period. Here the two men are using different yardsticks.
Gates: donations and long-term research money
In 2015 Gates founded Breakthrough Energy, an umbrella for several organisations meant to speed up clean-energy innovation. Its venture fund, Breakthrough Energy Ventures, was announced in December 2016 with a first fund of US$1 billion backed by a group of very wealthy investors. It deliberately backs risky technologies, such as green steel, cement, long-duration batteries and new fuels, that might take two decades to pay off. Gates has also written and spoken widely on climate, including his 2021 book on avoiding a climate disaster.
Some of this money is investment rather than charity, and in March 2025 Gates wound down Breakthrough Energy’s European unit and its US policy team to concentrate on technology alone. Still, the scale of his climate-related funding is real and well documented.
Musk: companies, products and one big prize
Musk’s main climate contribution is commercial. Tesla turned electric cars into mainstream products and pushed the whole car industry to follow, and its battery and solar businesses aim to replace fossil-fuelled power. Those are businesses that also made Musk extremely rich, so they are not donations. On the charitable side, Musk funded the $100 million XPRIZE for carbon-removal technology, announced in 2021, through his foundation.
Put side by side, Gates probably does give more in the narrow sense of charitable climate money. Musk’s defenders argue that building companies that sell millions of electric vehicles has a bigger effect than grants. Both can be true at once. Neither man’s figure has been audited against the other’s on a like-for-like basis, so any ranking is opinion rather than fact.
Why the spat drew so much attention
Part of the interest is personal. Two of the richest people in the world sniping at each other online makes headlines, and both have large, loyal fan bases. Part of it is a real question about how private wealth should be used against climate change: through charity and research grants, through profitable companies, or through markets that reward and punish firms.
The feud also kept running. Musk continued to mock Gates over the short in later years, and the Isaacson book gave both men’s versions of their awkward meetings, including a visit by Gates to Musk in Austin. Nothing in the record suggests either man changed his mind.
Common misunderstandings
- “Shorting Tesla took money out of Tesla.” Not directly. A short seller trades with other investors, not with the company. The effect, if any, is on sentiment and the share price.
- “Gates denied the short.” He did not. In the 2022 interview he defended it as harmless, and later reporting on Isaacson’s biography says he confirmed it to Musk.
- “Gates gives more, so he does more for the climate.” That depends entirely on how you count. Donations, venture investment and company output are different things, and fair comparisons need the same measure for both men.
What to take from it
If you came here wondering whether Gates really said he outgives Musk on climate, he did, in June 2022, and he said it while defending a bet against Tesla that he has since been reported to have kept for some time. If you want to judge who has done more for the climate, look past the slogans: compare like with like, ask over what period, and separate charity from business. The most useful lesson from this feud is that big claims about money and the climate deserve the same scrutiny as any other numbers.
Sources: Entrepreneur: Gates and Musk feud over climate giving (Emily Rella, 6 June 2022); The Register: Gates on shorting Tesla, from Walter Isaacson’s Musk biography (2023); Wikipedia: Breakthrough Energy. Embedded posts: Sawyer Merritt and Elon Musk on Twitter/X.
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