You Can't End World Hunger With 'Twitter Buyout' Money

May 04, 2022

It was back in January when millionaire-with-a-B Elon "Don’t Doubt Ur Vibe" Musk woke up in his $50,000 modular mini house in Boca Chica with a free speech craving and a loose idea of how to indulge it—he would quietly start polling all his Honey coupons and texting Amber Heard to Venmo him all the donations he made in her name so he could add the whole of www.twitter.com to the shopping cart for $54.20 a share.

A whopping $44 billion.

Now, you would think such a premium offer would send Twitter's board of directors into a Kool & The Gang's Celebration-type ecstasy of enthusiastic high-fives and tequila shots being drunk out of each other's buttholes but there was a problem. Elon's trash-talking against the board in April was an MMA octagon ring away from getting physical so they knew that if Elon's takeover succeeded he would turn the whole management team into a severance package.

It was not looking good for them.

Not wanting to waste precious printer ink on resumes, the board dusted off their copy of Sun Tzu's The Art of War and set to turn the takeover into a corporate colonoscopy for Elon—who I'm sure had already commissioned the edit to his Wikipedia entry—so he kept bringing his top-tier Monopoly auctioning skills which mainly consisted of taking out the business rules pamphlet and pounding his index finger over the "fiduciary duty" section until the board handed him Twitter's property card.

You know the aftermath.

Elon acquires Twitter and forwards his supervillain character arc, the trigger-eager demographics decide to get PTSD over it, the most hardcore of them announce they're leaving the platform altogether, and lizard-gaze millennial Mark Zuckerberg probably salivated at the thought of all those departing Twitterati converting their toilet scrolling time into Instagram traffic. Amidst all this chaos there was, however, one group of people that stood out from the crowd in the same way a golden turd excels among the standard greenish-brown hues.

Those who asked, "Why not take the $44 billion and end world hunger instead?"

Paraphrasing the U.N. World Food Program Director David Beasley, who not long ago had a twitter-based dick-measuring contest with Musk about who had the heavier deadlift, anyone with $6 billion burning in their pocket can actually afford to put every resident of the pale blue dot out of their starvation diets—you'd just have to want it bad enough, which I think it won't be a problem since other than James Corden's career, nothing like world hunger has the power to unite the populace under the unanimous conclusion that we're outraged to keep hearing about it and that it should end as quick as possible.

So why is Elon not doing anything about it?

I don't want this to sound like a manuscript of "Excuses for a Billionaire: the Nobody Cares Edition" but tossing banknotes doesn't work anywhere near as well for a world crisis as it does for a trap music video. If money was the all-encompassing solution to solve hunger then the first Live Aid concert wouldn't just be remembered as the third act of Bohemian Rhapsody but also as the pivotal Yankee blow of hype that ended growling tummies around the globe for good.

Money can mitigate a crisis—the keyword being "mitigate."

If 2 million starving people need to produce a poop right now or they would otherwise perish to famine then big fat checks can save the day. But what money rarely does is dissolve the underlying structures that create those problems in the first place.

In the know: here are some of the factors playing an Uno reverse card every time someone makes a donation to combat world hunger:

War. Just picture an anti-tank mine blowing up the road you need to keep a supply chain.
A huge lack of infrastructure is also a problem. People in some undernourished countries live in a fucking desert that's not even equipped with casino hotels to distract the population from the lack of basic macronutrients.
Of course, climate change. Because when your food comes directly from a crop field instead of the shelves of an Aldi, you're fucked if it either rains too much or too little.
Plant disease outbreaks. Because if excess or lack of water doesn't kill your crop, then crop-killing pathogens would do the trick.
And of course, the pandemic. Because fuck 2020 and everything it came up with.

But don't get me wrong.

I went three whole days without food once and the experience wouldn't get half a star from me on TripAdvisor so if $8 billion can put a bunch of people out of involuntary fasting for a couple of months then hell, have my signature. But something tells me Elon Musk’s psychology is not very much equipped to render reality in the same way.

Jump to this conclusion: there's this powerful "things vs people" factor when it comes to occupational choices and career interests, and it only takes a look at Elon's accomplishments timeline (which is full of things) to realise he's not the kind of Gandhi or Mother Teresa archetype that would clear his agenda to go spoon-feed formula to a starving kid in Zambia.

Musk will let people starve to go save civilization.

Some people think all that stuff about buying Twitter to protect free speech is the propaganda flyer version of "I just want to pamper my edgy 17-year-old sense of humour without getting cancelled." I also read he might use Twitter to train AI and make Terminators but maybe I was being too diligent when venturing into page 2 of Google results. Nonetheless, it's fair to say this is not the first time Elon bets on a company that bleeds more money than a sugar baby's allowance in the name of "saving civilization," so it might be true.

So, technically...

You can't end world hunger with 'Twitter buyout' money. Not only because complex problems need more than a budget to be solved, but also because that 'Twitter buyout' money belongs to a guy that gives fewer shits about saving individual people than he does about saving civilization. We need both kinds of people anyway. And if you still feel like it was a waste of money, remember Mark Zuckerberg burnt $500 billion on a logo rebranding.