Elon Musk pledges to give away SpaceX shares to ‘every kid in America’ in 2027

"Next year, I will give one of my SpaceX shares to every kid in America. This will be the first of many," Musk wrote in a post to X. The post has been viewed over 10 million times since he wrote the post early on Monday morning.

Although the first trillionaire did not detail how this would be carried out, there are approximately 72 million children in the US who are under the age of 18, per the Census Bureau. This would equate to around $10.5 billion in shares. On Friday, SpaceX's share price stood at around $146 when markets closed. SpaceX’s market cap was just short of $2 trillion when markets closed last week. Musk owns 48.4 percent of the company, or 6.42 billion shares.

The move from Musk came on the heels of Dario Modei's Anthropic promising to set aside 5 percent of its shares for a "public benefit" fund. The company posted to X, "We’re committing a portion of Anthropic’s shares to the Anthropic Public Benefit Fund, a new wholly owned entity dedicated entirely to the public benefit. It will start off with 5% of our shares. For every 50% increase in the company’s value over a set baseline, we can contribute up to an extra 2%, subject to our board’s discretion.”

At the time, Musk critiqued the move by the AI company and responded, “I recommend giving the shares directly to the public,” and added, “This is what I will be doing.”