For over ten billion US dollars – Musk wants to give “every child in America” a SpaceX share

Tech billionaire Elon Musk has announced that he will give every child in the US a share of his space company SpaceX. “Next year I will give every child in America one of my SpaceX shares,” said the richest person in the world at X. This will be his first such step “of many.”

He did not provide any information about how he plans to implement his announcement. According to official figures from 2024, around 73 million children and young people under the age of 18 live in the USA. According to Forbes magazine, Musk owns 38 percent of SpaceX.

At the current price of SpaceX shares, the share package for such a gift to them would be worth more than ten billion dollars (8.92 billion euros). Musk's fortune is currently estimated by the financial service Bloomberg at a good $900 billion. It consists mainly of shares in SpaceX and the electric car manufacturer Tesla, which he also runs.

A trigger for Musk's move appears to be the announcement by the AI ​​company Anthropic at the weekend that it would initially contribute five percent of its shares to a fund that is intended to benefit the public good. Musk then wrote to X that he recommended transferring shares directly to the public.

The SpaceX share initially took off after the IPO in June - but with prices below $150, it is now far from its highs beyond the $200 mark. There are still doubts about the current valuation of $1.9 trillion. The rocket business is currently relatively small, and the valuation is more of an advance from the stock market on the successes in artificial intelligence promised by Musk. SpaceX is well behind Anthropic and the ChatGPT developer OpenAI in this area.

Musk's stock announcement is reminiscent of an election promise made by US President Donald Trump: In September, the Republican head of state promised US citizens $5,000 (around €4,460) each if his party won the congressional elections on November 3rd.

Musk seemed to have fallen out with Trump last year, but now he seems to be back in the president's favor. At the beginning of October, Trump awarded the entrepreneur the country's highest scientific honor and described Musk as "our modern-day Thomas Edison." Musk has donated at least $276 million to the Republican campaign for the November elections.

With its IPO in June, SpaceX eclipsed all previous ones. The group had collected $85.7 billion.