Musk pledges SpaceX stock for ‘every kid in America’ as billionaires push direct donations
Anthropic, an AI rival to SpaceX, earlier said it would form a “public benefit fund” and other tech moguls have contributed to savings accounts for children.
Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, said that he would give away one share of SpaceX, his rocket and artificial intelligence company, to “every kid in America” next year, in a social media post on Sunday night.
“This will be the first of many,” he added in the post on X, the platform owned by SpaceX.
Musk, whose net worth is around $904 billion according to Bloomberg, did not specify how he planned to give away his shares. His commitment came shortly after Anthropic, an AI competitor and customer of SpaceX, said it would divert a significant portion of its shares to a “public benefit fund” with a philanthropic mission.
Musk did not respond to a request for comment.
There were about 72 million children under the age of 18 in 2025, according to estimates. If Musk were to give away that many shares, the donation would be worth around $10.5 billion at SpaceX’s latest stock price. It would represent his largest charitable donation to date.
Musk is by far SpaceX’s largest shareholder, controlling more than 6.4 billion shares. The company held a record-setting initial public offering in June, and Musk is not able to sell or trade the bulk of his stock until June 2027 because of so-called lockup provisions.
In recent days, Musk and SpaceX have come under criticism after Ukrainian forces faced restrictions on satellite internet services provided by the company that were used in battlefield operations against Russia. Musk has suggested that the decision to restrict services came from the U.S. government.
Musk has also been donating heavily to Republican groups ahead of the midterm elections, spending more than $276 million since the start of July. Part of that includes a $158 million donation, one of the largest ever, to the main super PAC backing the party’s Senate candidates.
Musk is a 2012 signatory of the Giving Pledge, a commitment by the world’s richest people to give away half of their fortunes, but he has expressed skepticism of traditional philanthropy. His nonprofit, the Musk Foundation, had more than $14 billion assets at the end of last year, but over the last four years has failed to give away the minimum amount required by law.
In 2021, amid a larger discussion about his tax obligations, Musk said he would give $6 billion to the United Nations World Food Program if it could describe how it would use the money “to solve world hunger.” The organization developed a plan, but the billionaire did not donate.
Tech billionaires have recently pledged to donate to government-operated savings accounts for children known as Trump Accounts. In July, the Treasury Department seeded the first accounts for children born between 2025 and 2028 with one-time deposits of $1,000.
Michael and Susan Dell said they would donate $6.25 billion in cash to the accounts, and hoped that other philanthropists would follow their example and put billions more into the program. Gwynne Shotwell, SpaceX’s president, and her husband, Robert, said that they would donate one SpaceX share to each of more than 2 million children, focusing in particular on lower-income areas in Texas, where SpaceX is based.
In October, the Treasury Department said it had auto-enrolled more than 60 million children in Trump Accounts. Relatives, employers, philanthropists, government organizations and charitable groups can make deposits, including company stock, into the accounts.
It is unclear if Musk, who has said technology and AI advances will eventually lead to a society where money is obsolete, will donate his shares through the Trump Accounts program.
Anthropic, the influential AI company preparing for a blockbuster public offering, said on Sunday that it would commit 5% of its shares to a fund intended to make donations to nonprofits “or direct distributions to specific populations.” The fund could address the potential “instability” in labor markets cause by AI, the company said.
Musk said he would take a different approach. “I recommend giving the shares directly to the public,” he wrote on X, in a reply to Anthropic’s announcement posted on the site.
“That’s what I will be doing,” he said in a follow-up post.
Seven hours later, he announced his pledge to donate stock to every child in the United States.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
