Elon Musk pledges to give a SpaceX share to every U.S. child

Aimee Picchi Mon, October 19, 2026 at 3:03 PM UTC

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Elon Musk said in a social media post on Monday that he plans to give one of his SpaceX shares to each child in the U.S., writing that the gift "will be the first of many."

Musk didn't specify how the shares would be distributed or other details of how the pledge might be fulfilled. The offer arrived a day after artificial intelligence company Anthropic announced that it will commit 5% of its shares to a new "public benefit" fund.

Anthropic said it will contribute an additional 2% of shares at its board's discretion for every 50% increase in the company's value, above a set threshold.

Shares of SpaceX, which will report quarterly earnings on Tuesday, rose $3.46, or 2.7%, to $149.49 in Monday morning trading.

The SpaceX CEO is the company's largest shareholder with a 10.5% stake, according to financial data firm FactSet. His stake included 4.8 billion shares of SpaceX when the company went public earlier this year, an event that briefly made Musk the world's first trillionaire.

There are about 73 million children in the U.S., according to Census Bureau data.

Musk, the world's richest person, is currently worth about $904 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.

Anthropic made its pledge to commit a portion of its shares to the Anthropic Public Benefit Fund, which it described as "a new entity," at a time when AI researchers from leading labs are warning of doomsday scenarios with potentially catastrophic outcomes that extend far beyond job losses.

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Anthropic said the company has a two-pronged mission, with its research providing both a public benefit component and for-profit value. The new fund will give it more flexibility to make large donations to nonprofits or gifts to specific populations, the company added.

Anthropic also called out AI's impact on workers, acknowledging that tech advances could "cause instability" for many employees, and noted that it has already committed $200 million to analyzing and addressing AI's effects on parts of the labor force.

"Because of the way the Fund is structured, the more Anthropic grows, the larger the share of the company that can be dedicated expressly to the public good," Anthropic said.

Musk could conceivably use the recently created Trump Accounts program to gift SpaceX shares to U.S. children. The accounts, under new rules laid out by the Treasury, allow donors to deliver stock to the accounts without paying capital-gains taxes.

The Treasury Department is automatically enrolling up to 60 million children in the Trump Accounts program.

The tax-deferred accounts, created under Mr. Trump's One Big Beautiful Bill tax and spending bill for U.S. citizens born between Jan. 1, 2025, and Dec. 31, 2028, are eligible for a $1,000 seed donation from the government.

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Source: “AOL Money”