Back in April, Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla, feuded on Twitter with billionaire Bill Gates, who denied his attempt to short Tesla shares.
The conversation occurred just days before Musk sent a nasty tweet comparing Gates to the “pregnant man” emoji.
In an interview with French YouTuber HugoDécrypte, Gates defended his climate change philanthropy record and questioned the utility of electric cars.
“I give a lot more to climate change than Elon or anyone else,” Gates said. “I give a lot of philanthropic dollars; I back companies – you know electric cars are about 16% of emissions, so we also need to solve that other 84%.”
“But somebody shorting the stock doesn’t slow him down or hurt him in any way,” he added.
Responding to an extract of the interview on Twitter in which Gates defended his position, Musk simply replied: “Sigh.”
The communication occurred more than a month after Musk acknowledged in late April that he turned down an opportunity to work on philanthropic work with Gates. Musk shared a text discussion in which he questioned Gates about his $500 million shorting stock purchase against Tesla.
Before the billionaire duo met, Musk questioned Gates if he still had a “half-billion-dollar short bet against Tesla.”
“Sorry to say I haven’t closed it yet,” Gates responded. “I would like to discuss philanthropy possibilities.”
Musk responded by dismissing Gates’ offer, arguing he couldn’t take it seriously “since you have a massive short position on Tesla, the company doing the most to tackle climate change.”
Gates also noted in the interview that he did not engage in Musk’s, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’, and Virgin Group founder Richard Branson’s “space race” as he’s more focused on fighting diseases like measles and malaria.
