Latest news with #MuskFoundation
Miami Herald
04-05-2025
- Business
- Miami Herald
Mark Cuban has a bold offer for Elon Musk
Many billionaires in the world have more than enough money to fix some of the problems that make life harder than it needs to be. Take Jeff Bezos, for example, who Forbes reported as the second-richest person in the world in 2025 with a net worth of $203.6 billion. The former Amazon CEO has used a portion of his riches to address climate change and support a preschool network in low-income communities by creating the Bezos Earth Fund and Bezos Day One Fund, respectively. While many criticize the evils of the company he created in Amazon, it can't be denied that he's used some of his billions to foster good. Don't miss the move: SIGN UP for TheStreet's FREE Daily newsletter Elon Musk, the world's richest man, also established a philanthropic business with his Musk Foundation, which he set up in 2001. However, the foundation has come under public scrutiny over the years, having no full-time staff and allegedly having "failed in recent years to give away the bare minimum required by law." The New York Times called the Musk Foundation "haphazard and largely self-serving." Related: DOGE cuts are already saving Elon Musk billions Another high-profile billionaire known for philanthropy and spending his money on meaningful causes is "Shark Tank" alumni Mark Cuban, whose Cost Plus Drugs business launched in 2022 with the aim of "eliminating the middleman" and offering medications at affordable prices. Cuban and Musk have famously gone back and forth on social media over a variety of topics, with Cuban making a point of asking Musk hard questions about his businesses than often go unanswered. Now, Cuban's issued an interesting challenge to Elon Musk via his X platform, and it would be quite notable if Musk followed through. Image source: Beverly/WireImage In a tweet posted on on X on May 1, a physician using the handle RealDocSpeaks posted a troubling chart from pharmacist Jeremy Counts. Counts' original post reads, "Virginia Medicaid is paying more per member for medication than any state in the country, and nearly none of that money is getting to independent pharmacies. We MUST have the transparency a single PBM brings to rein in drug costs @GovernorVA." The post included a list of medications and their markups in the state of Virginia. Calcitrol, which treats low calcium levels caused by kidney disease, topped the list with an astonishing markup price of 22,441% more than what Ohio pays for the same drug. Related: High-profile investor has harsh words for Elon Musk RealDocSpeaks commented on the reshared post, saying, "There is plenty of money in health care, it is just going to the wrong people. Our current system rewards useless middlemen and punishes those caring for patients. In short, our system is backwards. It is time to reward pharmacists, physicians, physical therapists, and all who help patients daily. It is time to eliminate as many middlemen as possible." In the thread's comments, user @sonodoc99 said, "Can you imagine the progress the U.S. would make if @elonmusk and @mcuban worked together?" Cuban then jumped into the thread, saying, "I'm ready any time." However good of an idea it is for Musk and Cuban to collaborate on a solution to make medications more affordable, Musk clearly has his hands full at the moment. After Tesla's recent earnings call left investors disappointed as Musk announced a 71% drop in profit, Musk announced he would be stepping away from his duties at DOGE for President Trump's administration and refocusing on Tesla. And that's not even counting all the other projects Musk has percolating: X, the social media platform he continues to mold to his liking; Neuralink, which is actively putting implants into patients; and xAI, which is the home of X's AI tool, Grok. And let's not forget that Musk is also incorporating his own city. Boca Chica Village, Texas, is quickly becoming Starbase. Populated by only a few hundred people and most of them SpaceX employees, the complex has been in development since the 2010s. So the bad news is that Cuban may be waiting a while for this exciting collaboration. But judging on the success of Cost Plus Drugs and the aid it's brought to millions in need, it doesn't exactly seem like Cuban needs much help. Related: Mark Cuban raises red flag about concerning consumer behavior The Arena Media Brands, LLC THESTREET is a registered trademark of TheStreet, Inc.
Yahoo
23-04-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Xprize Carbon awarded to a dirt simple carbon removal technology
Sometimes the simpler idea is the winner. That's certainly the case with the winner of the Xprize Carbon Removal competition, which was announced on Wednesday. Mati Carbon walked away with the $50 million grand prize for its enhanced rock weathering program that locks carbon in soils for thousands of years. The Musk Foundation underwrote the prize. The runners up were NetZero, which produces biochar; Vaulted Deep, which processes and buries waste biomass; and Undo Carbon, another enhanced rock weathering startup. Mati also beat finalists that spanned a range of technologies, from direct air capture to ocean alkalinity enhancement. 'It's really been a honor to be selected amongst the luminaries of carbon removal who have been competing for this prize,' Shantanu Agarwal, founder and CEO of Mati Carbon, told TechCrunch. Mati's carbon removal technology, enhanced rock weathering, is simple. The company grinds up rocks that naturally convert carbon dioxide into stable minerals, increasing their surface area to help them absorb carbon more quickly. Then the rock dust is spread on farm fields where mineralize carbon and contribute micronutrients to the soil. Several different types of rocks work for enhanced rock weathering, but Mati uses basalt, a volcanic rock that's available in a number of regions around the globe. There, fine particles are often waste from aggregate used in construction. Logistics are key to making enhanced rock weathering work for carbon removal. Mati applies basalt to the farmers fields free of charge. Costs are supported by a mix of grants and carbon removal credit sales. The company expects to deliver about 5,000 to 6,000 metric tons of carbon removal credits this year. Agarwal said that Mati is aiming to sell credits for less than $100 per metric ton by the early 2030s. Longer term, he anticipates the price will drop to $70 to $80 per metric ton. To validate the credits, the company takes eight samples for every three acres of farmland. As its database grows and its models improve in accuracy, Mati expects it'll need far fewer samples. Around 200 million smallholder farmers could benefit from adding basalt to their fields, Agarwal said. Altogether, those small farms, generally less than 24 acres, support about 1 billion people. 'It's about 800 million to 900 million acres of farmland,' he said. 'You deploy that into carbon removal, you get more than a gigaton of removal every year while increasing income of these farmers who are extremely poor.' After a season, farmers typically get 25% more productivity from soils that are fertilized and 50% to 70% in soils that are degraded, Agarwal said. The soil amendment also improves water retention. 'This material is the difference between having a crop and having no crop. We've seen that in Zambia this year. There were farmers who put this in half of the field — and half of the field was like normal — and there was no crop normal half because everything died because there was a drought.' To reach all those farmers, Agarwal admits that Mati is unlikely to grow quickly enough. So Mati is planning to give free licenses to its enterprise resource planning (EPR) platform to organizations provided those organizations pledge to share at least 50% of any profits with the farmers they serve. In addition to Zambia, Mati also operates in India and Tanzania. The company plans to add three more countries this year, eventually expanding to encompass much of the Global South, Agarwal said, a term that refers to developing countries. Like many other climate tech startups, Mati is registered as a public benefit company. But unlike many others, the company is controlled by the Swahili Initiative, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit. 'I want to build a market mechanism and scale a nonprofit to global scale, which allows for large portion of the value to accrue the farmer,' Agarwal said. 'This Xprize is going to go a long way to push us in that direction.' Sign in to access your portfolio
Yahoo
26-03-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Fact Check: Don't fall for this story about Musk paying medical bills, arranging Neuralink brain implant for sick girl
Claim: In March 2025, tech billionaire Elon Musk paid the medical bills of Lily Thompson, a 7-year-old with a rare neurological disorder, and also arranged for an experimental device produced by his company Neuralink to be implanted in the child's brain. Rating: In late March 2025, a rumor spread online that Elon Musk, the tech billionaire and adviser to U.S. President Donald Trump, paid for the medical bills of Lily Thompson, a 7-year-old girl who allegedly suffered from a rare neurological condition. According to the rumor, Musk also arranged to have the girl's brain implanted with the experimental brain-computer interface device that Musk's company Neuralink produces, leading to her miraculous recovery. Some (archived) social media posts (archived) about the rumor included an image that appeared to show Musk next to a child in a hospital bed and a caption reading: When Elon Musk heard about 7-year-old Lily Thompson, a girl battling a rare neurological disorder that left her unable to walk, speak, or even breathe without assistance. She was facing astronomical costs and fading hope, Lily's family received an unexpected lifeline when Musk personally pledged to cover every penny of her care, including a pioneering surgery that could restore her chance at a normal childhood. Lily's condition, a degenerative brain disorder diagnosed at age 3, had defied conventional treatments, leaving her parents desperate as medical bills soared past $2 million. Enter Elon Musk, who, after reading about her plight in a local news story, directed his Musk Foundation to intervene. He not only paid off the family's debts but funded an experimental procedure at a top California hospital, implanting a Neuralink chip to repair damaged neural connections. "No child should suffer when we have the tools to help," Musk reportedly told doctors, insisting on fast-tracking the effort to give Lily a fighting chance. So before you key a random person's Tesla, or set fire to a Tesla dealership, or speak ill of the great Elon Musk. I ask you, what the hell did you do for Lily? (Facebook page Just the Facts) Other (archived) posts (archived) about the rumor consisted of the same image with a shorter caption reading, "Elon Musk covered all medical expenses and fully funded the surgery and Neural Chip implantation to save this poor little girl's life. Thank you, sir!" along with a link to an article on a website called that purported to give further details about Musk's interactions with the girl. That article began: Elon Musk, the billionaire trailblazer of Tesla and SpaceX, has touched hearts worldwide by stepping in to save a young girl's life, covering all her medical expenses and funding a groundbreaking Neuralink chip implantation. The story unfolded on March 22, 2025, when Musk learned of 7-year-old Lily Thompson, a girl battling a rare neurological disorder that left her unable to walk, speak, or even breathe without assistance. Facing astronomical costs and fading hope, Lily's family received an unexpected lifeline when Musk personally pledged to cover every penny of her care, including a pioneering surgery that could restore her chance at a normal childhood. In short, there was no evidence that the story about Musk paying a child's medical bills and arranging for a Neuralink device to be implanted into her brain was anything but a fictional tale designed to garner clicks and shares. As a result, we've rated the claim false. First, the timeline of events described in the article was impossible. According to it, Musk first learned of Thompson's plight on March 22, 2025 — only a day before the March 23 publication date of the article. The article claimed that Thompson had not only already undergone the implantation surgery by the time the article went live the following day, but also that she began to speak and walk "within days" after the surgery. The article also referred to social media phenomena that did not occur in reality. Part of the article read, "Online, X erupted with praise, with users sharing Lily's before-and-after photos under hashtags like #MuskSaves and #NeuralinkMiracle, turning her story into a beacon of hope for families facing similar struggles." A search (archived) on X for one of those hashtags, #MuskSaves, returned two results, neither of which related to the Thompson story in any way. A search (archived) for the hashtag #NeuralinkMiracle returned no results. A Google search for the terms "Lily Thompson" and "Neuralink" also found no media coverage of the story, which would have made headlines if it were true. In addition to the lack of any demonstrable evidence corroborating the details of the story, both the text of the article and the image of Musk next to the child in the hospital bed showed signs of being the products of artificial intelligence (AI) software. The AI text detectors ZeroGPT and GPTZero both found a high probability that the text of the article was AI-generated. Likewise, the AI image detectors WasItAI and Decopy AI reported with high confidence that the image was the work of an AI program. Human trials for the Neuralink device have been ongoing since early 2024, when doctors implanted the company's chip in the brain of an adult quadriplegic man. Although that patient has spoken positively of the implant, it did not restore his ability to use his limbs. In March 2025, the patient told the BBC that he hoped he might someday be able to control his wheelchair through the device, but that for the time being he largely used it to play computer games. Musk announced in January 2025 that a total of three volunteer patients had so far undergone implantation of the chip and that he hoped the company would implant up to 30 more devices in human patients in 2025. Although not all of the patients' identities were public at the time of this writing, there was no indication that any of them were children. According to Neuralink's website, patients interested in enrolling in future clinical trials must be legal adults: (Neuralink) We've previously investigated other fictional claims about Musk that appeared to be entirely or partially the product of AI software, such as a rumor that he saved the home of an elderly woman who had lived there for 70 years. "Elon Musk Says a Third Patient Got a Neuralink Brain Implant. The Work Is Part of a Booming Field." AP News, 13 Jan. 2025, Esposito, Joey. "Watch out for This Story about Musk Once Saving the Home of an Elderly Woman." Snopes, 13 Mar. 2025, Kantrowitz, Alex. Full Q&A: Neuralink Patient Noland Arbaugh on His Injury, Selection, and Newfound Superpower. Accessed 26 Mar. 2025. Neuralink. "Neuralink — Pioneering Brain Computer Interfaces." Neuralink, Accessed 26 Mar. 2025. ---. "PRIME Study Progress Update — User Experience." Neuralink Blog, 8 May 2024, The Man with a Mind-Reading Chip in His Brain, Thanks to Elon Musk. 23 Mar. 2025,
