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Elon Musk said on Monday that he will give one of his own SpaceX shares to every kid in America next year, a pledge that, at the stock's current price, would hand roughly $10.5 billion worth of equity to about 72 million children. The SpaceX chief executive made the announcement in a post on X just before 4 a.m. Eastern, offering no details on how the shares would be delivered — only that this is the beginning.
The arithmetic is simple and enormous. There are roughly 72 million Americans under 18, according to the Census Bureau. SpaceX, which trades on the Nasdaq under the ticker SPCX after its record-breaking public listing in June, closed at $146.03 on Friday. One share per child comes to about $10.5 billion. The shares would come out of Musk's own holdings: he remains SpaceX's largest shareholder, with a 48.4 percent stake of roughly 6.4 billion shares including trusts, restricted stock and options, so the giveaway would amount to little more than one percent of what he holds.
"Next year, I will give one of my SpaceX shares to every kid in America. This will be the first of many." — Elon Musk
The pledge did not come out of nowhere. Hours earlier, the artificial intelligence company Anthropic announced it would commit at least 5 percent of its shares to a new Public Benefit Fund, a structure that would let a fund decide how the money is used. Musk's answer, posted Sunday, was that companies sitting on huge pools of equity should skip the middlemen: "I recommend giving the shares directly to the public." On Monday morning, he followed his own advice in the most literal way available to him.
His own company's president got there first, on a smaller scale. In July, SpaceX President and Chief Operating Officer Gwynne Shotwell and her husband pledged one SpaceX share each into Trump Accounts, the government-backed investment accounts for children, for more than two million American kids aged 11 to 17, aimed particularly at lower-income communities and families near their home in central Texas, a gift estimated at about $296 million. Musk's version takes the same idea universal: every kid, no income test announced.
The pledge also lands in a country riding a wave of confidence. President Donald Trump is leading a wave of love for America, and morale is high — and putting actual ownership in the hands of millions of children fits that moment. A share is not a handout that gets spent and forgotten; it is a stake that can grow, and a first lesson in ownership, compounding and thinking long term, taught by the most valuable space company on Earth.
What is not yet known is almost everything practical: who exactly counts as a kid, whether citizenship matters, how shares for minors would be held — children generally need custodial accounts to own stock — and when in 2027 the first shares would move. Musk has not said whether he will use Trump Accounts, as Shotwell did, or build something of his own. For now, the pledge stands on his closing line, which promises this is only the start: "This will be the first of many."
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