Elon Musk claims he will give one of his SpaceX shares to “every kid in America” in 2027, which would result in a gift worth more than $10 billion based on the current $146 share price of his combination spaceflight and AI company. That’s roughly 1% of his $1 trillion net worth.
It’s not clear how Musk plans to do this, though he said in a separate post that he wants to give the shares “directly to the public,” and that this will be the “first of many” shares he’ll donate.
President Donald Trump, who Musk spent around $300 million to help elect, has set up bank accounts for children through the Treasury, called Trump Accounts, that can accept stock donations from wealthy donors.
Musk did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Musk’s post came just a few hours after Anthropic promised to put 5% of its shares into a new “public benefit fund,” which it intends to use to make “large donations to traditional nonprofits or direct distributions to specific populations” after its upcoming IPO.
On Sunday afternoon, Musk replied directly to Anthropic’s post on X about its new fund, suggesting the company should give “directly to the public” instead.
“This is what I will be doing,” he wrote in another reply four hours later. Then, overnight, he announced his plans to donate SpaceX stock.
There are currently more than 70 million children under the age of 18 in the United States, according to the Federal Interagency Forum on Child and Family Statistics. Musk owns around 849 million Class A common shares of SpaceX, and more than 5.5 billion Class B supervoting shares. He stands to earn many more.
Musk’s philanthropic giving to date has been almost exclusively done through his own Musk Foundation. Despite his negative opinions about philanthropy, it’s the fifth-largest private charitable foundation in the U.S. A recent review by The Economist showed that a majority of the total money laid out by the Musk Foundation over the years has gone to entities tied to Musk in some way. Nearly 60% has gone to another charity, called The Foundation, run by his money manager, Jared Birchall.
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Sean O’Kane is a reporter who has spent a decade covering the rapidly-evolving business and technology of the transportation industry, including Tesla and the many startups chasing Elon Musk. Most recently, he was a reporter at Bloomberg News where he helped break stories about some of the most notorious EV SPAC flops. He previously worked at The Verge, where he also covered consumer technology, hosted many short- and long-form videos, performed product and editorial photography, and once nearly passed out in a Red Bull Air Race plane.
You can contact or verify outreach from Sean by emailing [email protected] or via encrypted message at okane.01 on Signal.