Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk received his crowd-funded couch earlier today and matched the raised amount of money as a donation to the ‘Renewable World’ charity.
The campaign started as a joke by YouTuber Ben Sullins who saw the TV report of Musk sleeping on an incredibly uncomfortable couch at the Tesla factory in Fremont, California.
Not only did the community gather the requested $1000, but they surpassed it by a lot: the campaign resulted in over $9,000 from the YouTuber’s and Tesla Club of Sweden’s initiatives.
Support
The money raised was left untouched because furniture company Wayfair kicked in with a hi-end couch as a contribution instead. What followed was the surprise doubling of the funds by Musk, which will help residents of Nepal get back on their feet amid the aftereffects of a massive earthquake in 2015. The support goes through UK-based charity ‘Renewable World’ whose members aim at fighting poverty through renewable energy.
Conclusion
All of this along with the documented delivery of the couch was shared in a video on the ‘Teslanomics by Ben Sullins’ channel today. While the GoFundMe campaign, started by Sullins, proved to be more than helpful and incredibly successful, the YouTuber thinks this should be left as a stand-alone initiative. ‘I think Elon and everyone really appreciates this – it’s wild, it’s fun – but I don’t think we should keep doing this. This was kind of a random one-off thing’, Ben Sullins says in his video.
‘Renewable World’ members expressed their gratitude in a video attached to Teslanomics’, as well as an article on their official website.
Tesla or Elon Musk himself are yet to make an official statement regarding the donation and how the couch contributes to Musk’s better rest in-between overseeing the processes at the Fremont factory.