Elon Musk says that next year he will give one of his own SpaceX shares to every child in America. "This will be the first of many," he wrote on X early on Monday, October 19. Peter H. Diamandis, founder of XPRIZE and host of the Moonshots podcast, presented the post as Musk's answer to Anthropic's newly announced equity fund for public benefit. Musk had criticized that fund, Diamandis said, and "within hours, he answered."
Diamandis and his co-hosts recorded the episode the next day with guest Chamath Palihapitiya, founder and CEO of Social Capital and co-host of the All-In Podcast. They agreed that each child's share is worth little. Most of them argued that its value is in what owning a share teaches.
The arithmetic
Diamandis worked through the numbers on air. There are 72 million Americans under 18, and SpaceX stock traded at about $148 that day, he said. By his count that comes to roughly $10.5 billion in total, or $146 a child, and about 1.1% of Musk's stake. His $146 figure is a little below the share price he quoted: at $148 a share, 72 million shares would be worth about $10.7 billion. ABC News, reporting on the day of the post, used a price of around $150 and about 73 million US residents under 18, for a total near $11 billion. ABC also reported that Musk had not said what age cutoff would apply, how children would qualify or when the shares would be handed out.
According to Diamandis, the post drew 520,000 likes and 27 million views in less than a day. He said the top reply, with 30,000 likes, read: "I identify as a kid in America."
President Trump thanked Musk for "giving SpaceX stock to millions of American children through Trump accounts," adding: "This is exactly what was envisioned when we created Trump accounts." A Trump account is a new tax-advantaged savings account that belongs to a child, with a parent or guardian acting as custodian. US children under 18 with Social Security numbers are eligible, according to the SEC's investor guide. The government pays $1,000 into the accounts of eligible citizens born from 2025 through 2028. Ordinary contributions go into low-cost funds that track the broad US stock market.
Cash versus shares
Diamandis compared Musk's pledge with an earlier gift. Last December, Michael and Susan Dell committed $6.25 billion to Trump accounts, $250 each for 25 million children. The Dells' implementation update reports nearly 25 million funded accounts. Their money mainly goes to children born from 2016 through 2024 in ZIP codes where median family income is around $117,300 or less, plus eligible children on military bases.
"Unlike the Dell gift of cash, Elon's transferring equity," Diamandis said. "A paycheck gets spent and shares compound."
He still doubted that gifts from billionaires and AI labs can "move the needle for the average American." His answer was "probably no." Diamandis said the average US household earns $87,000 a year, and that paying every American $10,000 a year would cost about $2.6 trillion a year. Against that, he called the philanthropy of Musk and Anthropic "kind of a gesture, not a funding source," adding that "even the biggest fortunes on Earth are just one-time paychecks."
Diamandis recalled a "birth dividend" Palihapitiya had proposed in the past, in which the government would invest $2,000 for every newborn and lock it in until age 65. He said he hoped Musk would attach a similar lock-in to his shares so they are not "liquidated and spent right out the bat." If the shares go into Trump accounts, some restriction would already apply. Treasury's temporary regulations on donated stock generally require it to stay in the account until five years after the contribution or the end of the year the child turns 17, whichever comes first, with some exceptions. That is far shorter than the lock-in in the birth-dividend idea.
Why the panel cared about ownership
Palihapitiya called the pledge "really the better version of the giving pledge." Most people who want to give, he said, lack the capacity to tell a good nonprofit or NGO from a bad one. He called it "a no brainer" to put money directly into the accounts of children, who can then take part in "the experiment that is capitalism and democracy in the United States." He also called the gift "unbelievably generous."
Diamandis said his own children split every dollar they earn: half goes into stocks, and the rest into savings, philanthropy and spending money. "They've all put it into SpaceX," he said. "I wonder where they got influenced like that."
He then asked Dave Blundin, founder and general partner of Link Ventures, whether 72 million new shareholders selling could hurt the stock. Blundin said no, because the gift is only about 1%. What interested him was the habit. The future of value, he said, comes "through asset ownership and not through employment, not through paychecks." He said he had told MIT undergraduates the day before that their window to profit from their "big MIT brain" was about the next two years, before AI could outthink them. "That doesn't mean wealth goes away," he said. "It all moves to asset value."
If children sell, Blundin said, their friends will tell them they were idiots, especially if Musk is right that SpaceX will be bigger than today's global economy. Diamandis put Musk's estimate at "$1 to $10 quadrillion." "Maybe he's right, maybe he's wrong," Blundin said, but "the ones that dump it will be talking to the ones who didn't."
Salim Ismail, founder of Open ExO, agreed. Broad participation in rising capital values would make "like 100x" more difference than the dollar amount, he said, because children would grow up "comparing it, seeing who sold, who didn't sell." Blundin added that other newly public companies wanting to look good to young people might follow. With "50, a hundred, 200 copycats," he said, "then it really does move the needle."
Palihapitiya compared the gift to employee share purchase plans, in which workers contribute each quarter and the company buys them stock at the quarter's low point. If workers and employers embraced the idea, he said, "it's a big deal." He also thought it would start what he called "the very difficult conversation about moving from defined benefits to defined contributions." A defined-benefit plan is a traditional pension that promises a fixed payout. In a defined-contribution plan, such as a 401(k), money goes into investments and the payout depends on how they perform. Palihapitiya said defined-benefit programs are "insufficient and they're poorly funded." Every change needs a starting point, he said, and Trump accounts and Musk's gift start that conversation.
A generation with a stake in one company
Diamandis asked Alex Wissner-Gross, a computer scientist and founder of Reified, whether the pledge would start setting expectations for frontier AI labs. "Yeah, maybe," Wissner-Gross said. Beyond "the obvious universal basic equity angle," he saw "potentially very clever marketing."
He asked listeners to imagine a generation that feels economically aligned with "presumably a merged SpaceX Tesla," and perhaps aligned on regulation too. Owning the general market, he said, "arguably would be a slightly better outcome for democracy." Under Musk's plan everyone would own a share in one company. He described walking past a protest against Musk in front of the Tesla dealership in Santa Monica, California. Then he asked what an America would look like "where every person in a generation owns an economic stake in Elon's prolific economic output." Would it be politically very different? "I think it probably would be."
Diamandis called the pledge "a brilliant move" and said Musk had been thinking about it for some time. About four months earlier, Diamandis said, he had texted Musk to ask whether he would fund $10 billion in XPRIZEs. Musk replied: "interesting, but I'm going to give my shares away." Diamandis linked the gift to Musk's talk of universal high income, which he said can only happen "if everybody gets a piece of the pie and grows with it."
Diamandis also mentioned that day's news that Tesla and SpaceX had formed special committees to discuss a merger. "That game is afoot," he said. Wissner-Gross said he thought the recent Tesla Roadster announcement had been "90%" about helping to secure that merger.