Elon Musk and Anthropic commit to giving away billions of dollars worth of stock

SpaceX Corp. Chief Executive Elon Musk pledged today to give every child in America a single share of the space company’s stock.

“This will be the first of many,” Musk wrote in the letter X contribution This revealed the move today. The announcement came a few hours after Anthropic PBC pledged donate at least 5% of its equity to a charitable fund.

As of July last year, there were 72 million children in the US, suggesting that Musk intends to give away 72 million SpaceX shares. That’s equivalent to $10.5 billion at the company’s last closing price.

Musk did not provide any information about how he plans to cash out the shares. However, he disclosed In an X post, he responded to Anthropic’s donation by saying he planned to “give shares directly to the public.” In another postMusk wrote “Thank you for helping make this possible” to tech investor Brad Gerstner, who played a central role in creating the Trump accounts. These are investment accounts that the White House opened for American children at the beginning of the year.

In July, SpaceX Chief Operating Officer Gwynne Shotwell pledged more than $320 million of her company shares to the Trump Accounts program.

Musk’s charitable activities have come under fire in recent months. He runs a charity that had assets of more than $14 billion as of December, but has reportedly failed to meet minimum donation requirements for the past four years. The funds paid out reportedly went to nonprofit organizations that work with Musk and his companies.

Musk pledged $1 billion to OpenAI Group PBC shortly after its launch in 2015. He donated just $38 million and later proposed taking majority control of the artificial intelligence provider, which was then operating as a traditional nonprofit. OpenAI changed its organizational structure a few years later to accommodate its commercialization efforts.

The ChatGPT developer’s biggest competitor, Anthropic, announced its own major charitable initiative shortly before Musk’s announcement. The company plans to donate 5% of its equity to a new charitable fund. Anthropic intends to add an additional 2% each time its valuation rises 50% “above a specified base value.”

The Anthropic Public Benefit Fund will operate as a subsidiary of the AI ​​provider and not as a standalone nonprofit organization. The company said one of the unit’s priorities will be to address the impact of AI on the labor market. Earlier this year Anthropic committed $200 million for external research initiatives focused on this topic.

The shares earmarked for the fund are in addition to the significant amount of equity pledged by the company’s employees. Together, the two initiatives will donate approximately 20% of Anthropic’s shares to charity. This stock could be worth $400 billion if the company reaches the $2 billion valuation it reportedly wants to reach in its upcoming IPO.

Photo: Trevor Cokley/Wikimedia Commons