Elon Musk has pledged to give a piece of SpaceX stock to every child in the United States next year – a gift that could be worth more than $10 billion.
“This will be the first of a long series,” the world’s richest man wrote on X on Monday.
About 73 million children under the age of 18 live in the United States, according to data from the U.S. Census Bureau.
At Friday’s closing price of $146.03, the commitment would be worth about $10.7 billion.
President Donald Trump thanked Musk on his Truth Social platform and claimed the shares would be given to children “through TRUMP ACCOUNTS,” the tax-advantaged investment accounts for children created under his tax and spending law last year.
This commitment comes two weeks before the midterm elections on November 3.
Musk is the largest known donor heading into this election, having given more than $276 million to Republican groups since July.
Musk did not specify which children would be eligible, when the shares would be delivered or how.
So how might the gift work, and who stands to gain?
Here’s what you need to know:
How much is SpaceX stock worth and how much is Musk giving away?
SpaceX, the world’s seventh-largest company, began trading on Nasdaq in June at an IPO price of $135 per share.
This price has been volatile. SpaceX shares have fallen 35.3% since their peak days after the listing.
The shares are currently trading at around $146 per share. Each $1 change in the stock price will change the value of the giveaway by approximately $73 million.
Musk owns 4.8 billion shares of SpaceX, according to a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in August.
Including unvested awards and stock options, his stake rises to approximately 6.4 billion shares, or 48.4 percent of the company.
The sale of 73 million shares would reduce his total stake by about 1.5 percent, barely affecting his control over the company. Indeed, its voting power, which is currently around 82% because SpaceX has two classes of shares, would only decrease by 0.1 percentage point, according to a Bloomberg Opinion calculation.
This would be the largest gift linked to the Trump accounts so far.
How would actions reach children?
Musk didn’t say it.
Trump said the shares would be held in the Trump accounts, and Musk thanked Brad Gerstner, the tech investor behind the accounts, for “helping make this happen.”
Nearly 70 million Trump accounts have been opened, one for each child under 18 with a Social Security number, according to the White House. Investments held in Trump accounts can be carried forward tax deferred until withdrawn when a child turns 18. Alternatively, they can be rolled over into a tax-advantaged IRA – an adult retirement account – and retain the tax-advantaged status.
Under Treasury rules released Sept. 30, donors can now gift individual shares of a company to children through the accounts. Families and friends who regularly contribute to a child’s Trump account are limited to investing in low-risk index funds.
Families cannot opt out of shares in their children’s names and generally cannot sell them for five years, or until the end of the year the child turns 17 if that happens earlier.
Musk cannot sell or trade most of his SpaceX shares until June 2027, the Wall Street Journal reported.
Who wins?
The accounts are named after the president, and Trump has tied himself closely to the gift.
He thanked Musk on Truth Social, saying the commitment was “exactly what was envisioned when we created the TRUMP ACCOUNTS.”
The White House touted the accounts as a landmark achievement of Trump’s tax law, noting that “all Democrats voted against” the legislation.
This commitment also marks a public reconciliation. Musk and Trump fell out in 2025 over Trump’s tax and spending bill, a rift that Trump later called a “small dispute.”
The kids will get a slice for free, but this gift could also save Musk some money.
Donors who give appreciated stocks to charity avoid capital gains tax and can usually claim a deduction, US broadcaster CNBC reported.
As the founder of SpaceX, Musk paid very little for his stock, and selling $10.7 billion of it could mean a tax bill of up to about $2.5 billion.
This is “a popular practice among particularly high-income taxpayers who would otherwise pay a high rate,” Will McBride, chief economist at the Tax Foundation, told the TV station in May.
Ann Lipton, a law professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder, told Inc. magazine that millions of shareholders unable to sell would also have an interest in SpaceX’s success and “minimizing its regulatory burdens.”
For Mitchell Downey, an economist at Stockholm University’s Institute for International Economic Studies who studies political influence in the United States, the most striking part of this engagement is what he calls the “horseshoe aspect”: the idea that right-wing and left-wing policies can bend and meet.
For decades, progressives have supported the concept of Child Development Accounts, investment accounts for each newborn designed to reduce wealth inequality, he said. The idea was associated with groups such as the Democracy Collaborative but struggled to gain support from the federal government. Now the idea could become more mainstream thanks to Musk’s gift and Trump’s accounts.
“I always felt like it might be out of reach,” Downey said. “But I don’t see how Musk’s proposal would be possible without building such infrastructure.”
Why is timing important?
This commitment comes just two weeks before the November 3 midterm elections, which will decide control of both houses of Congress. All seats in the House of Representatives and a third of the Senate are up for re-election.
Meanwhile, Trump’s approval rating has fallen to a record low of 33 percent, according to a Washington Post-ABC News-Ipsos poll, with many political observers expecting Republicans to lose seats to the Democratic Party.
Musk, who campaigned with Trump in 2024 and led the president’s Department of Government Efficiency initiative to reduce the size of the federal workforce, contributed extensively to Republican candidates ahead of the midterm elections.
Is it legal and why is it controversial?
Downey said he didn’t think the pledge raised any legal issues.
“Individuals are allowed to spend their money to support a politician,” he told Al Jazeera. “The law is only violated when it is not publicly reported or is part of an explicit and documented quid pro quo exchange.”
But he added that this raises ethical concerns, even if they are not unique to Musk’s approach.
These concerns are related to the “outsized role that outside donors play in U.S. elections,” Downey said. He said it applies much like when someone spends a lot of money on TV ads for a candidate.
Has anyone ever done this?
Downey said the precedent was “difficult to assess.”
With Musk being the richest person in modern history, he said, it’s perhaps not surprising that he would “do something that involves more money than other very rich people.”
He called the Gates Foundation’s spending over the past three decades “a different kind of ‘gift to the public’.” The difference, he says, is that the Gates Foundation focuses its funding on health crises in African and South Asian countries — not on American voters.
Last year, Gates pledged to “give away virtually all of his wealth through the Gates Foundation over the next 20 years to save and improve lives around the world.”
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