Elon Musk once described himself as “super pro-climate” and, as founder of Tesla, he has been a giant in the move toward electric vehicles. In 2016, he called for a “popular uprising” against the fossil fuel industry because the world was “unavoidably headed toward some level of harm and the sooner we can take action, the less harm will result.”
When President Donald Trump removed the U.S. from the Paris climate agreement in 2017, Musk quit a presidential advisory body in protest. “Climate change is real,” he tweeted at the time. “Leaving Paris is not good for America or the world.”
In his first appearance on the Joe Rogan Podcast in 2018, Musk stressed how strong the scientific agreement on climate change is, saying, “The scientific consensus is overwhelming. I mean, I don’t know any serious scientists – zero, literally zero – who don’t think that we have quite a serious climate risk that we’re facing.”
But Musk “has had little to say,” The Guardian’s Oliver Milman noted, after Trump once again pulled the U.S. from the Paris deal and issued a flurry of orders to ramp up oil and gas drilling and stymie renewable energy production. In January, Musk said: “Climate change risk is real, just much slower than alarmists claim.”
Musk is one of a number of prominent billionaires who have spoken out in recent years about the threat posed by climate change. And he’s one of a number who have been largely silent as the president has moved aggressively to reverse the nation’s transition to clean energy. “The silence from this slice of the billionaire and technology world was in line with the deferential posture of much of the rest of corporate America,” The New York Times’ David Gelles wrote.
While Meta Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg has never made climate action his primary cause, in a speech to Harvard graduates in 2017, he did call on the class to join in “stopping climate change before we destroy the planet.” That same year, he wrote in a post on Facebook: “Withdrawing from the Paris climate agreement is bad for the environment, bad for the economy, and it puts our children’s future at risk.”
One exception in this sea of recent silence is Michael Bloomberg, the former mayor of New York. In January, Gelles reported, Bloomberg said his charity would step in to help fund the United Nations climate body following the U.S. withdrawal from the Paris agreement.
“The American people remain determined to continue the fight against the devastating effects of climate change,” he said in a statement, lamenting what he called “a period of federal inaction.”
This would be an appropriate time for this billionaire class to rediscover its climate voice and explain to the president that climate change is not, as he has labeled it, “a giant hoax.” Globally, 2024 was the warmest year on record—more than two and half degrees hotter than the preindustrial average. In the U.S., there were 27 climate-related disasters that caused more than a billion dollars’ worth of damage.
Elon Musk has set his sights on Mars. First, he–and his fellow billionaires–should focus on Earth.