$2.1 Million In Donations Raised By Kimbal Musk’s Tesla Model 3, And $10 Raffle Donation Wins Car!

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It seems fitting that Kimbal Musk’s all-electric environmentally friendly car fundraiser brought in a little over two million dollars for his environmental nonprofit Big Green. The Colorado-based organization he founded teaches children about healthy and sustainable food through school gardening programs.

Omaze ran a raffle for the Model 3, which was one of the first ones manufactured. Each donation of $10 was equivalent to 100 entries, and a donation of $5,000 was worth 50,000 entries.

About two-thirds of the donors contributed $100 or less, and donations came in from 146 nations. The fundraiser lasted 64 days, and Musk made a prescient comment about the endeavor at the beginning: “It’s by far the most high-demand car in the world. It’s very special owning one of the first cars ever made.” The smashing success of the fundraiser later proved him to be quite right.

The winner is a resident of Colorado named Anthony, which is where Kimbal Musk lives too, but the geographic connection is nothing by coincidence. Anthony only donated $10 but won a vehicle worth far more. The base price of the car is $35,000 and he had a reservation for one, but it seems he would happily cancel that reservation after the $10 surprise.

Given the long line of reservation holders, it must have also felt great to not only get the steal of the century but also go straight to the front of the line.

VIN#006 is the number of Kimbal’s Model 3, which he is personally handing over to Anthony. The funds raised for the charitable work have a noble purpose. BigGreen has a very ambitious mission, but one that is justified by certain trends in America, like the obesity epidemic. Kimbal expressed his passion for helping children to eat healthier foods and to learn about sustainability: “I am focusing, first, on impacting high-need and underserved students because, sadly, these communities bear the brunt of obesity-related diseases. Eventually, we will reach every kid in all 100,000 schools in America because every child deserves to thrive in healthy environments that connect them to real food.”

Kimbal also has a very strong personal connection to food in that he trained to be a chef after working with Elon in Silicon Valley. He left California to study with professional chefs in New York, where he witnessed the attack on the twin towers. “I looked out the window and I saw the towers fall. But what made it special for me was I was able to volunteer for the firefighters for six weeks, cook for them, give them nourishing food every day and they come in from giant piles of melting metal that was still melting six weeks after the towers fell. We’d feed them, they’d connect with each other and they’d go back out to save American lives. It was just one of the most amazing experiences of my life. And that’s what got me to do a restaurant.”

He later moved to Colorado and started a community restaurant in Boulder called The Kitchen, and Big Green after that.

Image Credit: 1000×2020 on WikipediaCC BY-SA 4.0


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Jake Richardson

Hello, I have been writing online for some time, and enjoy the outdoors. If you like, you can follow me on Twitter: https://twitter.com/JakeRsol

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