Elon Musk vows to give every U.S. child a SpaceX share next year

Elon Musk said in an X post on Monday, October 19: "Next year, I will give one of my SpaceX shares to every kid in America. This will be the first of many". He gave no age range and no details on how the shares would be delivered. SPCX rose 1% in premarket trading on Monday.

The scale is large. There were 72 million children under 18 in the U.S. as of July 1, 2025, according to census data, so CNBC estimates the gift at about $10.5 billion worth of shares at a $146.03 share price. Musk owns about 4.8 billion SpaceX shares according to an August SEC filing, or 6.4 billion including unvested awards and stock options, a 48.4% beneficial stake. Because the shares would come from his own holdings, the pledge as described would not involve issuing new stock.

The pledge was a reply to Anthropic, which said it plans to commit 5% of its shares to a new public benefit fund, subject to shareholder approval, with the board able to add 2% for every 50% increase in the company's value above a baseline it has not disclosed. Responding to Anthropic's post on Sunday, Musk wrote, "I recommend giving the shares directly to the public," and said that is what he would be doing. SpaceX COO Gwynne Shotwell has separately pledged over $320 million in SpaceX stock to fund Trump Accounts for more than two million children.

The open questions are practical: who qualifies, when the shares would be delivered, how they would be held for minors and how gifts would be taxed. CNBC said it had asked SpaceX for comment. For shareholders, the near-term effect is a large block of stock eventually moving from Musk to tens of millions of new small holders.