Elon Musk, Anthropic pledge to give away billions of dollars in shares

Elon Musk, Anthropic pledge to give away billions of dollars in shares

SpaceX Corp. Chief Executive Elon Musk today pledged to gift a single share of the spaceflight company to every child in America. 

“This will be the first of many,” Musk wrote in the brief X post that revealed the move today. The announcement came a few hours after Anthropic PBC pledged to donate at least 5% of its equity to a public benefit fund. 

There were 72 million children in the U.S. as of last July, which suggests that Musk intends to give away 72 million SpaceX shares. That’s the equivalent of $10.5 billion at the company’s last closing price.

Musk didn’t specify how he plans to disburse the shares. However, he disclosed in an X post responding to Anthropic’s donation that he plans to give “shares directly to the public.” In another post, Musk wrote “thanks for helping enable this” to tech investor Brad Gerstner, who played a central role in the creation of Trump Accounts. Those are investment accounts that the White House opened for U.S. children earlier this year.

In July, SpaceX Chief Operating Officer Gwynne Shotwell pledged more than $320 million of her shares in the company to the Trump Accounts program.

Musk’s charitable activities have drawn scrutiny in recent months. He maintains a charity that had more than $14 billion in assets as of December, but reportedly failed to meet minimum donation requirements over the past four years. The funds that it did disburse reportedly went to nonprofits aligned with Musk and his companies.

Musk pledged $1 billion to OpenAI Group PBC shortly after its 2015 launch. He only donated $38 million and later proposed to take majority control of the artificial intelligence provider, which at the time operated as a traditional nonprofit. OpenAI changed its organizational structure a few years later to accommodate its commercialization efforts.

The ChatGPT developer’s top competitor, Anthropic, announced a major charitable initiative of its own shortly before Musk’s announcement. The company plans to donate 5% of its equity to a new public benefit fund. Anthropic intends to add another 2% every time its valuation increases by 50% “above a set baseline.”

The Anthropic Public Benefit Fund will operate as a subsidiary of the AI provider rather than as a standalone nonprofit. The company indicated that one of the unit’s priorities will be addressing the impact of AI on the labor market. Earlier this year, Anthropic committed $200 million to external research initiatives focused on that topic.

The shares earmarked for the fund will come on top of the significant amount of equity the company’s employees have pledged to give away. Put together, the two initiatives will commit about 20% of Anthropic’s stock to charitable causes. That stock could be worth $400 billion if the company achieves the $2 billion valuation it reportedly hopes to reach in its upcoming public offering.

Photo: Trevor Cokley/Wikimedia Commons