‘First of many’: Elon Musk plans to give every American child one SpaceX share next year, but details remain unclear
Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, announced on Monday that he will be giving every child in the United States one SpaceX share next year.
Musk made the announcement on X, writing, "Next year, I will give one of my SpaceX shares to every kid in America."
"This will be the first of many," he added.
However, it is still not clear how Musk's share distribution would work. He has not yet elaborated on his plans.
His decision comes in the wake of Anthropic announcing that it is allocating 5% of its shares to a fund which will make donations that address 'the public good'. Across the world, regulators have been calling for more regulations on artificial intelligence after it was flagged by insiders, including Anthropic CEO Darius Amodei, of the possibility of catastrophic scenarios if the technology is not controlled.
Anthropic itself has said that some of its new fund would go to address the "labor market impacts" of AI, as per a Bloomberg report.
After this announcement was made by Anthropic on Sunday, Musk replied to the company's X account, saying that it is better to give shares "directly to the public".
Musk's share in SpaceX
Musk holds 48.$% total equity of SpaceX, which comes to around 6.42 billion shares, including Class A, Class B, restricted shares, as well as stock options.
Alphabet, the parent company of Google, holds around 6% shares in SpaceX, which comes to a valuation of $94.1 billion.
Following the IPO of SpaceX on 12 June, Musk now holds 82% of the company's voting power, which highlights his control over the company.
However, as Bloomberg points out, Musk does have a history of floating ideas that don't see the light of day. He has also earlier explained away such plans as jokes. As the world's richest man with a net worth northwards of $900 billion has pinned his latest post about SpaceX shares at the top of his X page, it remains to be seen whether this idea materialises.