Elon Musk pledges to give a SpaceX share to every U.S. child

Updated on: October 19, 2026 / 8:25 AM EDT / CBS News Add CBS News on Google Elon Musk said in a social media post Monday that he plans to give one of his SpaceX shares to each child in the U.S., writing that the gift "will be the first of many."Musk didn't specify how the shares would be distributed or other details of how the pledge might be fulfilled. 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.Shares of SpaceX, which will report quarterly earnings on Tuesday, closed at $146.03 on Friday.The SpaceX CEO is the company's largest shareholder with a 10.5% stake, according to financial data firm FactSet. His stake included 4.8 billion shares of SpaceX when the company went public earlier this year, an event that briefly made Musk the world's first trillionaire. There are about 73 million children in the U.S., according to Census Bureau data.Musk, the world's richest person, is currently worth about $904 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. Edited by Stephen Smith The Associated Press contributed to this report. In: Elon Musk SpaceX