Elon Musk gives away billions to feed starving children on Mars
+ 📢 shoutout, 🔗 for your attention
Tesla CEO Elon Musk today announced his first ever significant philanthropic initiative, pledging part of his fortune to provide emergency relief to severely malnourished children, provided they are on Mars.
The entrepreneur's $10bn fund is projected to save millions of possible future lives, assuming humans are able to colonize the barren, oxygen-less, radiation-prone planet and cause extreme poverty once there.
"I'm very confident we’ll be living on Mars by 2035," Musk stated. "By 2040, if our colonization strategy goes as planned, we expect to see the emergence of hardship and famine among less dynamic parts of the population — making this fund absolutely critical. Save the kids!”
It is believed that Musk’s focus on those in need on Mars comes from his disappointment at starving children on Earth showing “a lack of real hunger”.
“We want to support emaciated kids who aren’t afraid to be disruptive by existing on another planet,” said a spokesman for Musk. “Those kids are the future, unlike the ones you see in countries like Africa who, frankly, don’t do much other than die.”
It is believed that 95% of the fund will be allocated to SpaceX’s rocket program, to set the eventual conditions for populating Mars with desperate children.
(Link to the original story on Attention.)
📢 SHOUTOUT: MOHAMED
I wrote in Monday’s newsletter about obsessively consuming the Al Jazeera live blog during the Arab Spring — turns out it was made by Mohamed Nanabhay, a reader of Attention! Mohamed was Head of Online at Al Jazeera from 2009 to 2012. His timely innovations, while all eyes were on the Middle East, played a large part in Al Jazeera’s enormous rise in web traffic and the establishment of Al Jazeera as a media organization with global reach. And led to the news addiction I mentioned — but also avoiding a fail in my Middle Eastern politics exam. Thanks, Mohamed!
🔗 FOR YOUR ATTENTION
(This isn’t the newsletter, but no reason I can’t drop in some extra fun anyway!)
Remember the age of Slime? I used to spend hours playing slime games like this one, which emerged around 1999. Over a quarter of a century ago. A few days ago, I was thinking fondly about Slime and fell down a rabbit hole to A Brief History of Slime, about the evolution of slime games online. My all-time favourite as a fan of the beautiful game was World Cup Soccer Slime — there was nothing quite like the thrill of progressing through the tournament:
From A Brief History of Slime:
may 26, 2002: quin gets an idea for a soccer game. there is a 15 page essay due in 36 hours time, when he decides to write the game. by morning, it is basically done. soccerslime is the result of the fourth great slime hackathon. within hours of the game being posted, traffic filters through to the site at about a hit per minute.
You can see, and play, these priceless internet artefacts here.
I’ll be back early next week with the newsletter!