Coronavirus News: Cook, Musk, Zuckerberg, Benioff Among Tech CEOs Donating Masks, Ventilators

KEY POINTS

Tim Cook, Mark Zuckerberg, and Marc Benioff how vowed to donate medical masks to hospitals across the U.S. and Europe
Elon Musk said Tesla will producing ventilators and expects to have over 1,000 ready for distrubtion in the coming days
General Motors and Ford will also be producing ventilators after President Trump gave the motor companies approval

Leaders of major technology companies, including Apple’s Tim Cook and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, have pledged to donate “millions” of masks and ventilators to hospitals that are struggling to keep up with the growing number of coronavirus cases.

Cook led the charge Sunday when he took to Twitter to pledge Apple’s aid in helping supply hospitals and medical centers across the U.S. and Europe.

Our teams at Apple have been working to help source supplies for healthcare providers fighting COVID-19. We’re donating millions of masks for health professionals in the US and Europe. To every one of the heroes on the front lines, we thank you.
— Tim Cook (@tim_cook) March 21, 2020

Zuckerberg followed, saying that Facebook was donating the 720,000 medical masks it had in reserve to “health professionals.” He said the company originally bought the masks in response to the California wildfires in 2019 but saw how hospitals needed more masks “urgently.”

Zuckerberg said Facebook was “working on sourcing millions of more to donate.”

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff said on Sunday that he donating thousands of medical masks. He said the company had provided the first 9,000 masks to the University of California, San Francisco, and that Salesforce was working to donate another 5 million masks over the next week.

Thank you to our Ohana for delivering our first 9000 masks to UCSF. We are working hard across all of our resources & relationships to deliver an additional 5 million masks this week plus additional critical PPE. All of us need to focus on getting PPE to our local hospitals. ❤️ pic.twitter.com/y7mgL0KhrT
— Marc Benioff (@Benioff) March 23, 2020

Elon Musk's Tesla, along with General Motors and Ford, will begin production of ventilators.

On Saturday, California Gov. Gavin Newsom said Musk was "working overtime" for ventilator production. Musk has also pledged to produce 250,000 masks.

After getting the greenlight, Tesla CEO Elon Musk said he expected around 1,200 ventilators to be ready for distribution by the end of the week.

We expect to have over ~1200 to distribute this week. Getting them delivered, installed & operating is the harder part.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 22, 2020