Elon Musk Wants to Give 70 Million Children Stocks — Three Top AI Model Companies Gave the Same Answer

The news of the world's richest man Elon Musk giving away money spread remarkably fast. Yesterday he posted a short message on X: next year, he will give one share of his SpaceX stock to every child in America.

Based on the October 19 closing price of $147.96, with roughly 70 million children in the US, one share each comes to just over $10 billion.

Technically, this is simpler than it sounds. The US already has a securities account that covers everyone and is tied to each child's ID number, launched in 2025, called the Trump Account.

The government gives every newborn a $1,000 seed deposit, the money is invested in index funds, and it can't be touched freely before age 18. By this year, 4 million children have opened accounts, and 1 million have received that $1,000.

Musk is simply changing 4 million into 70 million children.

The richest man giving away money is just the surface. Musk has his own separate logic, and Silicon Valley in America is trying to accomplish one thing.

That word is UBI, universal basic income.

A regularly disbursed sum of cash, unconditional, paid out to individuals.

Before Musk, his two major AI rivals did the same thing, just at different times.

2023, an iron orb

A mirrored sphere about twenty centimeters in diameter, mounted on an iron frame, placed at the entrance of a phone shop in Nairobi.

Walk up, press your eye to it. The sphere rotates once, the iris is captured as a video, compressed, uploaded. A few seconds later, a line of text pops up on the screen: verification complete. 25 WLD appears in the wallet.

WLD is a cryptocurrency on-chain that can be exchanged for cash.

This was the entire interface of that 2023 "universal basic income" experiment. No application form, no social worker, no hearing. One orb, one eye, a string of numbers.

The company doing this is called World. The founder is Sam Altman, the same Sam Altman who does OpenAI.

What World does is simple. Sam himself seems a bit scared looking at OpenAI, feeling that AI will increasingly resemble humans, and what he wants to do is let people prove they are human. Then give you money.

The logic isn't wrong. World burned money for several years, spread the orb to dozens of countries, and built a verification system for "the one and only you in the whole world"—iris, zero-knowledge proof, a string of hashes.

This has drawn much criticism. Some argue it's buying privacy with money, and some countries have already banned Sam Altman from setting up orbs to record irises locally. And WLD keeps falling, nowhere near UBI; living month to month on the WLD handed out, you couldn't survive two days.

Interestingly, three years on, that orb is still spinning, and the experiment hasn't stopped.

A pool that grows on its own

October 18, 2026, just a few days ago. Anthropic posted an announcement on its official website titled "Investing in the public benefit."

The company is setting aside 5% of its shares into a newly established entity called the Anthropic Public Benefit Fund. Thereafter, each time the company's valuation grows 50% above a set baseline, the board can add another 2%.

This fund is not a charitable foundation. It is a limited liability company wholly owned by Anthropic, which can "make large donations to traditional nonprofit organizations" or "distribute directly to specific populations."

Anthropic did the math: adding the 80% of their respective holdings that the founders pledged to donate at founding, plus the employee matching program (about half of employees participate), roughly 20% of shares in total will be used for public benefit.

How much is 20%? Outside expectations for Anthropic's post-IPO valuation range between $1.5 trillion and $2 trillion. At the low end, 20% is $300 billion: spread across 340 million Americans, that's $880 per person.

Clearly, the three top large-model companies that fight and argue with each other endlessly have, over these three years, wanted to do roughly the same thing—simply put, give out money. Just in different postures.

Of course it's no coincidence.

The same answer

Actually the earliest was Musk. In February 2017, at the Dubai World Government Summit, he sat on stage and said: robots and AI taking jobs will bring "a massive social challenge," and "ultimately we will have to have some form of universal basic income. I don't think we're going to have a choice."

That was nine years ago. GPT didn't exist yet.

Altman turned the logic into a paper in 2021. He said that once AI enters the labor market, the price of many kinds of labor will fall and approach zero; more power will shift from labor to capital; if public policy doesn't adjust accordingly, most people will be worse off than today. So he advocates "taxing capital, not labor," then distributing what's collected directly to citizens—"the best way to improve capitalism is to let everyone benefit directly from it as an owner."

Anthropic's founder Dario Amodei, the man who says every day that AI will go hard at humanity, says that if AI delivers even a small fraction of its potential, it will likely become a "general substitute" for labor, and these gains will come with falling demand for human labor, "which many workers will struggle or be unable to absorb." He later said that in five years, half of entry-level white-collar jobs will be replaced.

Three people, three points in time, one shared judgment: this technological revolution replaces labor itself.

Then they went off to think: if people don't work, what do people live on.

In 2024, at VivaTech in Paris, Musk gave the conclusion he endorses: "In a benign scenario, we may all have no jobs. It will be universal high income, not basic income, high income. Goods and services won't be in short supply." He put an 80% probability on this scenario.

Altman and Amodei clearly also endorse Musk's view, so what the two of them think about is: how does the money flow to people's hands.

Altman talks about distribution. He says that in the future humans will spend more time with the people they care about, caring for others, looking at art and nature, or doing public good; but what he cares about more is clearly how the money is split. His plan is specific down to tax rates: levy a tax on companies each year equivalent to 2.5% of market value, paid in stock; levy 2.5% on private land value, paid in cash; citizens over 18 receive a per-capita dividend. He did the math himself: ten years out, 250 million American adults would each get about $13,500 a year.

Amodei talks about tiers. Like a graded emergency plan: when unemployment is 5%, expand the existing "pre-distribution capital accounts"; when unemployment is 10%, expand unemployment insurance, add wage insurance, give tax breaks to companies that don't lay off; only when unemployment reaches unprecedented levels does the focus shift from "temporary transition" to "long-term income for a large portion of the population," requiring "new sources of tax revenue," possibly including basic income, sovereign wealth models, equity-sharing mechanisms.

These people who are putting humans out of work have switched to a new narrative and turned themselves into humanity's saviors.

The method is giving out money.

Anthropic has staked 20% of its shares, which at a $1.5 trillion valuation is $300 billion.

Musk has staked stock, which at today's price is just over $10 billion.

Altman's side has already been giving out money for 3 years.

It doesn't generate a cent

Whether giving out money actually works, humanity has tested for fifty years.

Finland ran an experiment in 2017: 2,000 unemployed people, €560 per month each, for two years. They were indeed quite happy, but employment didn't improve.

In 2019 in Stockton, California, 125 residents, $500 a month. The money went to food, rent, car repairs, and people were still working.

From November 2020 to October 2023, in Texas and Illinois, 3,000 people. 1,000 received $1,000 a month, 2,000 received $50 a month. Those receiving money worked on average 1.3 fewer hours per week, eight fewer days a year; but those actively looking for work actually increased by 10%; they spent $310 more per month, $67 on food, $52 on rent, $50 on transport. But the most counterintuitive part: three years, $36,000, didn't make their health any better.

The real problem is the money. $1,000 per person per month, 260 million American adults, is $3.1 trillion a year. The entire annual revenue of the US federal government is about $5.2 trillion. A basic income "not enough to live decently in any state" would eat up sixty percent of federal finances.

And corporate income tax brings in only about $500 billion a year. Confiscate all the income tax paid by every company in America, and it's only enough to cover one-sixth of this bill.

But even if taxes were raised later and the money were enough, there's a second hurdle: cash flow.

There is only one model in the world that has truly worked. In 1976, Alaska used oil revenue to build a permanent fund. In 1982, the first check arrived at residents' homes. Every year since, for over forty years. One year each person got over two thousand dollars, another year only a few hundred. The amount floats with oil prices and investment returns, but that check has never stopped.

Because they give out money from the returns, and new petrodollars flow in every year. It's not a "give once" fund, it's a machine with "water coming in every year."

Whether AI company shares can compare to oil is still hard to say.

In this round of AI iteration, the three best able to pay really are starting to look like they can drill for oil.

Eighteen years old

That orb is still spinning at the shop entrance in Nairobi.

A child born in Ohio in 2026, at age 18, opening the account, will see an index fund, a bit of government seed money, and perhaps one share of SPCX. What SpaceX's valuation will be then, whether xAI still exists, which round Anthropic's pool has paid out to—all impossible to say.

Only one thing is certain: this is probably the first generation in history to "hold shares in an AI company from birth."

This first generation, 18 years later, on an afternoon with no need to work, converting a little SPCX into a cup of Americano—what will they be thinking?

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