Elon Musk says he will give a SpaceX share to ‘every kid in America’
By Anna Cooban, CNN
London (CNN) — Elon Musk has said he will give every child in America a stake in SpaceX, his $2 trillion aerospace and artificial intelligence company, as tech firms face intensifying scrutiny over their impact on society.
“Next year, I will give one of my SpaceX shares to every kid in America,” he wrote on X on Monday. “This will be the first of many.”
SpaceX only began trading publicly in June (and after the biggest initial public offering in history). The company’s shares were trading for about $146 when the market closed on Friday.
Musk’s proposal was thin on detail. It is not clear how those shares would be distributed to the tens of millions of American children or whether all of them would even be eligible.
According to the United States Census Bureau, there are roughly 73 million people under the age of 18, making Musk’s potential giveaway worth about $10.7 billion at SpaceX’s current share price.
Offering young people a stake in the US stock market isn’t a new idea. This month, the Treasury Department automatically signed up millions of under-18s to Trump Accounts, a new federal savings and investment vehicle, with children born between the start of 2025 and the end of 2028 eligible for a one-off $1,000 government contribution.
In July, SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell and her husband pledged to donate one SpaceX share to each of roughly 2 million children already signed up to an account. The couple said they will prioritize donations to children from lower-income households and in SpaceX’s home state of Texas.
Damage control?
Musk’s offer came in response to Anthropic’s announcement on Sunday that it will commit at least 5% of its shares — worth $48 billion at the private company’s latest valuation — to a “Public Benefit Fund” that will donate money to social causes.
The fund could make “large donations” to nonprofit organizations or “direct distributions to specific populations,” the company wrote on its website, adding that the money could help mitigate the impact of artificial intelligence on people’s jobs.
Musk, the world’s richest person, retorted on X: “I recommend giving the shares directly to the public… This is what I will be doing.”
Musk signed the Giving Pledge in 2012 — a commitment by the world’s richest people to donate the majority of their wealth to charitable causes during their lifetime or in their wills.
His charitable organization, the Musk Foundation, focuses on grant-giving in a handful of fields including renewable energy, space exploration and pediatric research, according to its website.
According to a New York Times analysis last year, the foundation held more than $14 billion in assets at the end of 2024, making it one of the largest in the United States. But the Times said the foundation’s donations that year went largely to organizations closely connected to Musk’s business interests.
SpaceX did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the Times’ claims.
Musk has also openly questioned the effectiveness of traditional charitable giving. Speaking about philanthropy on the People by WTF podcast last year, Musk said: “We should try to do things that help our fellow human beings.”
“The biggest challenge I find with my foundation is trying to give money away in a way that is truly beneficial to people,” he said. “It’s very easy to give money away to get the appearance of goodness. It is very difficult to give money away for the reality of goodness.”
In 2021, Musk said he would sell $6 billion-worth of Tesla stock and donate it to the United Nations’ World Food Programme if the organization could demonstrate how the money would “solve world hunger.” It does not appear that Musk has yet donated the sum.
Both Musk’s and Anthropic’s offers come as AI companies face intense backlash over the safety of their products (Anthropic itself recently warned of the “existential risk to humanity” posed by the technology), the potential for AI to push humans out of their jobs en masse, as well as the social and environmental impact of the industry’s gargantuan data center buildout.
Tech titans more broadly are catching heat.
New movies like “The Social Reckoning” — about a Facebook employee blowing the whistle on unsafe company practices — and documentary “You Can See Everything” — following blood testing start-up founder and convicted fraudster Elizabeth Holmes — are helping to remind audiences of the long-running recklessness of some in Big Tech.
Musk himself is the subject of the new documentary “Musk,” charting his life and career. It is unsparing in its criticism of some of his business practices and his controversial foray into politics.
The-CNN-Wire
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