London - Elon Musk has said he will give every child in America a stake in SpaceX, his $2 trillion aerospace and artificial intelligence company, as tech firms face intensifying scrutiny over their impact on society. “Next year, I will give one of my SpaceX shares to every kid in America,” he wrote on X on Monday. “This will be the first of many.” SpaceX only began trading publicly in June (and had the biggest initial public offering in history). The company’s shares were trading for about $146 when the market closed on Friday. Musk’s proposal was thin on detail. It is not clear how those shares would be distributed to the tens of millions of American children or whether all of them would even be eligible. According to the United States Census Bureau, there are roughly 73 million people under the age of 18, making Musk’s potential giveaway worth about US$10.7 billion at SpaceX’s current share price. Offering young people a stake in the U.S. stock market isn’t a new idea. This month, the Treasury Department automatically signed up millions of under-18s to Trump Accounts, a new federal savings and investment vehicle, with children born between the start of 2025 and the end of 2028 eligible for a one-off $1,000 government contribution. Damage control? Musk’s offer came in response to Anthropic’s announcement on Sunday that it will commit at least five per cent of its shares — worth US$48 billion at the private company’s latest valuation — to a “Public Benefit Fund” that will donate money to social causes. The fund could make “large donations” to non-profit organizations or “direct distributions to specific populations,” the company wrote on its website, adding that the money could help mitigate the impact of artificial intelligence on people’s jobs. Musk retorted on X: “I recommend giving the shares directly to the public… This is what I will be doing.” Both offers come as AI companies face intense backlash over the safety of their products (Anthropic itself recently warned of the “existential risk to humanity” posed by the technology), the potential for AI to push humans out of their jobs en masse, as well as the social and environmental impact of the industry’s gargantuan data center build-out. Tech titans more broadly are catching heat. New movies like “The Social Reckoning” — about a Facebook employee blowing the whistle on unsafe company practices — and documentary “You Can See Everything” — following blood testing start-up founder and convicted fraudster Elizabeth Holmes — are helping to remind audiences of the long-running recklessness of some in Big Tech. Musk himself is the subject of the new documentary “Musk,” charting his life and career. It is unsparing in its criticism of some of his business practices and controversial foray into politics.
