As a South Carolinian, I’ve followed our former Governor David Beasley for years. If you would have told me that he would become the world’s most successful fundraiser, I would have told you that you’re crazy. But here we are.
By any standard, when you look at the effort to dollar ratio, I don’t know if anyone has ever raised so much money with so little effort.
With just a few tweets that took minutes to write and send, Beasley, now Executive Director of the United Nations World Food Programme, raised nearly $6 billion to end world hunger.
Here’s how it went down:
Beasley entered into a Twitter feud with everyone’s favorite eccentric billionaire, Elon Musk, when he asserted that instead of focusing on space, Musk, Bezos and Branson should focus on solving Earth’s problems, specifically world hunger. He claimed it would take $6 billion.
Musk responded and asked for details. He tweeted, “Please publish your current & proposed spending in detail so people can see exactly where money goes. Sunlight is a wonderful thing.”
The back and forth continued for awhile and then it all went silent. We don’t know exactly what happened behind the scenes, but last week it was reported that Elon Musk donated $5.7 billion in Tesla stock to a charity for world hunger.
Details are still unclear, but it’s looking like David Beasley may have ended world hunger with a few tweets.
We discuss this story and many others in this episode of Under Fire. You can listen to it and other episodes here.
