Musk pledges a share of his SpaceX company to ‘every kid in America’

Billionaire Elon Musk has pledged to give one share of his company SpaceX to “every kid in America”.

The offer arrived a day after artificial intelligence company Anthropic announced in a social media post that it will commit 5% of its shares to a new “public benefit” fund.

In a response to that Sunday post, Mr Musk wrote: “I recommend giving the shares directly to the public.”

SpaceX’s stock closed at 146.03 US dollars (£109.56) on Friday.

With approximately 73 million children under the age of 18 in the US, this would put the value of Mr Musk’s pledge at about 10.66 billion dollars.

Anthropic said on Sunday that the shares it was committing would go to the Anthropic Public Benefit Fund, a new entity within the company.

The fund’s worth would potentially increase as the shares grew in value.

Mr Musk did not provide further details on how his share pledge would be carried out.

The announcements by Mr Musk and Anthropic come at a time when Americans are growing increasingly wary of AI.

A new poll from The Associated Press-NORC Centre for Public Affairs Research found that most Americans, 64%, think AI is developing “too fast”, while 27% say its development has been “about right” and 8% say it is moving “too slow”.

Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei, OpenAI’s Sam Altman, SpaceXAI’s Mr Musk and other prominent industry leaders said last month that AI’s development needs to slow down.

The consensus came after an Anthropic researcher resigned with a dire warning about the threats the technology poses to humanity.

But obstacles including domestic and global competition, profit motivations and pushback from US President Donald Trump all stand in the way of a co-ordinated effort to pace AI’s development.

Mr Musk has quietly become the biggest known donor in this year’s US midterm elections, doling out more than 276 million dollars (£208 million) since July to try to save Republican majorities in Congress.

Mr Amodei and the company’s five other co-founders established Anthropic as a public benefit corporation, a designation that for-profit companies select to balance financial goals and social impact.

Anthropic is planning a massive initial public offering (IPO) as soon as November.

In June, the company said that it had submitted a confidential filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission for its proposed IPO.

That same month, Mr Musk’s SpaceX made its Wall Street debut as a publicly traded company and made him the world’s first trillionaire.