Elon Musk, chief executive of SpaceX Corp., said today that he will give one share of the spaceflight company to every child in the United States, a pledge he described as the first of several. The announcement came hours after Anthropic PBC committed at least 5% of its equity to a public benefit fund.
Musk disclosed the SpaceX plan in a brief post on X. He did not detail how the shares would be distributed, but in a reply to Anthropic's donation he said he intends to hand shares directly to the public. In another post he thanked tech investor Brad Gerstner, who the source article says played a central role in creating the Trump Accounts, the investment accounts the White House opened for U.S. children earlier this year.
The scope of the SpaceX pledge tracks the size of the U.S. child population. There were 72 million children in the country as of last July, implying Musk intends to give away 72 million SpaceX shares, or about $10.5 billion at the company's last closing price. In July, SpaceX Chief Operating Officer Gwynne Shotwell pledged more than $320 million of her own shares to the Trump Accounts program.
Musk's charitable record has drawn scrutiny in recent months. He maintains a charity holding more than $14 billion in assets as of December, but the source article reports it failed to meet minimum donation requirements over the past four years, and that the funds it did disburse went to nonprofits aligned with Musk and his companies. Musk also pledged $1 billion to OpenAI Group PBC shortly after its 2015 launch, donated only $38 million, and later proposed taking majority control of the AI provider, which then operated as a traditional nonprofit.
Anthropic's initiative, announced shortly before Musk's, directs 5% of its equity to a new public benefit fund and adds another 2% each time its valuation rises 50% above a set baseline. The Anthropic Public Benefit Fund will run as a subsidiary of the AI provider rather than a standalone nonprofit, and the company said one priority will be addressing AI's impact on the labor market, a topic it committed $200 million to in external research earlier this year.
The fund's shares come on top of equity Anthropic employees have already pledged to give away. Combined, the two commitments would devote about 20% of Anthropic's stock to charitable causes, worth $400 billion if the company reaches the $2 billion valuation it reportedly hopes for in its upcoming public offering.
More company and startup news from TechManNews.
