Don't buy a Tesla. Because Elon Musk.
Throwing shade on the UN World Food Program makes you the world's biggest asshole.
Earlier this month when the UN’s World Food Program director David Beasley called on billionaires to help solve world hunger, Elon Musk vowed to sell $6 billion in Tesla stock. But only if Beasley could tweet “exactly how” the money would feed humanity.
First of all, the optics of a person famous for building rocketships and electric cars telling the director of the world’s largest humanitarian food aid program to prove that he knows what he’s doing is like a shark telling a cow how to graze.
So how should Beasley answer Musk? I vote for the following:
“@ElonMusk, I’ll give you $87,000 for an electric car if you promise a 95% across-the-board reduction in being an asshole. ”
For one, there is no market mechanism for feeding the 43M people on earth currently on the brink of starvation. Yeah, that’s right: 43,000,000 people. One California and Five States of Maine worth of people are starving to death, right now.
So while Elon gets paid when one of his SpaceX rockets blasts a satellite into orbit or when Tesla sells a car, Beasley gets paid to execute the efficient and humane distribution of billions of dollars in food assistance to keep people alive.
But what’s most sickening about Musk’s comments is that “food assistance” as it stands is barely that. It would be more appropriately named “starvation prevention” or “shit you eat to stay alive for, like, another few hours. Maybe a day or two.”
That’s because what’s on offer via the UN’s World Food Programme (WFP) are emergency rations completely inedible to pretty much any person Elon Musk has ever met.
And what’s in these rations, you ask?
Well, if you happen to be one of those persons completely dependent on food assistance, you get something called the World Food Program Food Basket, which consists of:
a staple such as wheat flour or rice;
lentils, chickpeas or other legume;
vegetable oil (fortified with vitamin A and D);
sugar; and
iodized salt
And if you’re really lucky you might also receive something called a supplementary ration – used when people have access to some but not enough food. This additional tasty treat is a fortified mix of blended food, sugar and vegetable oil.
In both cases, you’re getting a shitty deconstructed falafel - but without tzatziki or pickled onions. That’s because when you’re feeding 43M people every day, you can only deliver the most efficient existential nutrition possible.
So when Elon Musk tells a humanitarian leader like David Beasley to “prove it”, I challenge him to spend one day eating a meal from the World Food Program Food Basket. Maybe Musk will turn the food basket into a working Five-star restaurant?
I doubt he can pull off such a trick, but maybe he should at least try. If nothing else, at least then he will understand that his comments qualify him as quite possibly the biggest asshole on earth.