On October 18, Anthropic said it would commit 5% of its shares to a new Anthropic Public Benefit Fund, an LLC that could make large donations to nonprofits or direct distributions to specific populations.
Elon Musk replied on X that he recommended “giving the shares directly to the public,” and pledged one of his SpaceX shares to every kid in America next year. That $146 per share gift for 72 million children is around $10 billion. Compared to Musk’s net worth at $904 billion, somewhere a man is very proud of a tip.
So let us take Musk at his word, always a bold financial strategy, and make the pledge global. The problem will be familiar. We have not yet built the capacity to absorb serious philanthropy. Money moves only as fast as the receiving infrastructure. Musk is not the constraint. The pipe is.
Sign Up Now for more digital philanthropy insights
Musk is Right About Direct Gifts
Give the man his due before we check his math. Anthropic’s fund is a wholly owned LLC that its own board directs. A share in a child’s name is an asset the child owns, and nobody in San Francisco decides what it is for.
Cash-transfer researchers have argued for two decades that people living in poverty know what they need better than intermediaries do. Musk has stumbled into their position, which may be the first time he and GiveDirectly agreed on anything.
The trouble is delivery, and delivery is where Musk’s promises typically go to die.
Every Child on Earth is Totally Possible
Roughly 2.3 billion people are under 18. At $146 a share, a global gift costs about $350 billion. That is about 39% of his wealth, and it would leave Musk with a little over $500 billion to get by on.
At the same time, his SpaceX voting power falls from about 82% to about 72% due to its dual shareholder classes. He would still run SpaceX with room to spare.
Narrow it to children born from 2026 through 2028, the same cohorts that get federal Trump Accounts. Call it 400 million children, per the UN, and that’s $58 billion, about 6% of his net worth. Musk could cover that from his Class A shares alone and lose about half a point of voting power. He has lost more value than that in a bad week of posting on X.
Congress Built the Pipe to American Kids
The American gift has a delivery mechanism.
Trump Accounts give every child born from 2025 to 2028 a federally funded $1,000 investment account. In July, SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell and her husband pledged a share to each of roughly 2 million children already signed up. “Directly to the public” turns out to mean through a federal program Congress has already built. A familiar path for SpaceX.
A newborn in Lilongwe or Kinshasa has no such account and no way to hold a US-listed share. So route the money the boring way that works. Musk gives the stock to the Musk Foundation, the foundation sells it, and it sends cash to GiveDirectly.
Required: Real Musk Foundation Actions
This is the part where the thought experiment requires the most imagination.
The Musk Foundation missed the IRS 5% minimum payout in 2021, 2022 and 2023, and fell $421 million short in 2023. It has no hired staff and a three-member volunteer board that includes Musk.
A $58 billion gift breaks that habit by law.
The 5% rule means about $2.9 billion a year in grants, six times what the foundation gave in 2024. Musk already controls well over 20% of SpaceX’s votes, so the excess business holdings rule should require the foundation to sell the gifted shares within five years.
For once, the foundation would have to sell stock, write checks to strangers, and hire people to read grant reports. Selling about 80 million shares a year is small next to the 555 million shares SpaceX sold at its IPO, so the stock price would survive the experience. The volunteer board might not.
GiveDirectly Would Grow Tenfold
GiveDirectly expects to deliver $90 million in lump-sum transfers in 2025 and says it could responsibly absorb another $250 million or more within a year. Its stretch goal is $5 billion by 2035.
Paying 400 million children before they turn 18 means moving about $3.2 billion a year, roughly ten times GiveDirectly’s stated ceiling. At the ceiling, it takes about 170 years. Musk’s Mars colony might open first.
The footprint is smaller than the cohort, too. GiveDirectly works mostly in sub-Saharan Africa. India, with about 23 million births a year, and China, with 8.7 million, sit outside it. Africa had roughly 47 million births a year. A three-year African cohort is about 140 million children, or $21 billion.
At GiveDirectly’s ceiling, that is still about 60 years of work.
There is one more trap. A single donor supplying most of a charity’s revenue can push it toward failing the IRS public support test. A foundation that writes GiveDirectly a $2.9 billion check to meet its payout could hand it a tax problem along with the money.
Musk Fed the Global Pipe Into the Wood Chipper
The irony writes itself. In February 2025, Musk posted that he had spent the weekend “feeding USAID into the wood chipper.” Yet that very same USAID disbursed $72 billion in fiscal year 2023, much of it through the same receiving systems a global share gift would now need.
The richest man on Earth now wants to give children money, and the pipe he would need is the one he shredded.
We Can Build It Back Better
Here is the good news, and it is real.
GiveDirectly calls its Poverty Relief program shovel-ready and underfunded, with capacity sitting idle this year. Since January 2024 it has run Rx Kids in Flint, Michigan, with the city and the state, sending cash to mothers and infants.
GiveDirectly also reports early evidence that cash during pregnancy and infancy could cut child mortality in half, a claim worth watching as the trial results are published.
A tweeted pledge is the cheap part. The expensive, unglamorous part is the grants office, the payment rail, and the local partner that can take money without breaking. The pipes are there. Is the will?
