One SpaceX Share Per Child: The New AI PR Strategy

Elon Musk’s SpaceX and AI giant Anthropic have said they will give billions of dollars in shares to the public as general sentiment around the technology’s economic and societal consequences continues to plummet. 

“Next year, I will give one of my SpaceX shares to every kid in America,” Musk posted on X on Monday. “This will be the first of many.”

The SpaceX CEO did not provide any more details on how distributing the shares would work, but for some quick math, as of Tuesday morning, one share in the company is worth nearly $150, meaning with about 72 million children under 18 in the US, the donation would amount to $10.8 billion. Musk’s net worth is nearly $1 trillion, so the shares would be worth less than two percent of his net worth. 

Musk’s donation sounds a lot like the president’s Trump Accounts, which promise to give US children born between 2025 and 2028 a government-funded investment account of $1,000. Trump himself thanked Elon Musk for his “incredible generosity” in a Monday social media post and said the SpaceX stock would come “through TRUMP ACCOUNTS!” The president also did not explain how this would work.

A day before Musk’s announcement, Anthropic announced it would pledge five percent of its shares to a “public benefit fund” to help ameliorate “labor market impacts” of AI technology. The details are murky, with promises that the fund would make “large donations to traditional nonprofits or direct distributions to specific populations.” The startup also committed to add two percent for every time the company’s value increases by 50 percent above an undisclosed baseline amount and is planning one of the largest IPOs in history worth around $1.5 to $2 trillion. 

Anthropic presents itself as an AI frontier lab that prioritizes safety, coming up with its own draft bills to regulate the industry. But AI is already one of the leading causes of layoffs, and an Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll published earlier this month found that 64 percent of Americans think AI development is happening “too fast” and about 80 percent say it’s “extremely” or “very” important for the US government to prioritize protecting jobs from the technology.

Promises of public shares in AI companies, which, in the absence of any real regulation—and even working to dodge accountability—have been left to police themselves, do not address these concerns. It’s just a misdirect.