Elon Musk Wants To Give Out Prizes Of US $ 100 Million. What For?

JAKARTA - Billionaire and CEO of Tesla, Elon Musk, promised a prize of 100 million US dollars, for supporting the development of technology programs that can capture carbon dioxide emissions.

This was conveyed by Musk in a tweet on Twitter on Thursday, January 21 yesterday. He even made two tweets.

"I am donating a $ 100M prize for the best carbon capture technology," he wrote in his first tweet.

"Details next week," he wrote again in a second tweet.

Am donating $ 100M towards a prize for best carbon capture technology

- Elon Musk (@elonmusk) January 21, 2021

Capturing emissions that heat the planet is an important part of many strategies to control climate change. However, so far the progress made on this technology has been minimal. The focus has been on reducing emissions, rather than capturing carbon in the air.

The International Energy Agency (IEA) said late last year that it needed significant improvements in the application of carbon capture technology by all countries if it was to meet the net zero emission target.

There has been no confirmation from Tesla officials regarding this. However, this is in line with US President Joe Biden's desire to accelerate the development of carbon sequestration technologies, as part of a plan to tackle climate change.

Elon Musk himself is known as a billionaire and entrepreneur in a number of futuristic companies. In addition to Tesla with electric vehicles, he also leads the rocket company SpaceX and Neuralink, which developed a brain machine interface technology with very high bandwidth, to connect the human brain to a computer.