SpaceX CEO Elon Musk had an early Monday morning idea: Every American child should be a shareholder.
The move follows Anthropic’s idea to allocate 5% of its stock to a public benefit fund. (Anthropic plans to raise money in an IPO later this year.) Share giveaways appear to be a new way to slake public concerns about AI safety.
“Next year, I will give one of my SpaceX shares to every kid in America,” Musk tweeted at 3:52 a.m. Eastern time. “This will be the first of many.”
There are roughly 70 million Americans below the age of 18. That number of shares is worth $10 billion at current levels. It also represents a little more than 1% of the six-plus billion SpaceX shares Musk controls.
He is unlikely to be gifting the Class B shares, which have 10 votes per share. Musk holds about 850 million Class A shares that he could give away without ceding much control over his company.
Exactly what shares, when, how, and importantly why the distribution might happen is hard to say. SpaceX didn’t respond to a request for comment.
The altruistic move might have helped shares. SpaceX stock rose 1.3% on Monday to $147.96, while the S&P 500 rose 0.4% and the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 0.1%.
A rebound after a bad stretch is also a likely reason for the early gain. Shares dropped more than 10% last week amid a broader selloff in technology stocks. The Nasdaq Composite dropped about 4.5%. That index gained 1.1% on Monday.
The recent decline came just ahead of SpaceX’s third-quarter earnings report on Tuesday. Wall Street is looking for earnings per share of 14 cents from sales of $12.9 billion, according to FactSet.
Estimates have been rising since SpaceX’s better-than-expected second-quarter earnings report. SpaceX reported sales of $7.8 billion, better than the $6.8 billion analysts projected. Since the report, SpaceX’s third-quarter sales estimate is up about $2.5 billion. The earnings per share estimate is up about six cents.
After the report, SpaceX management will host an earnings conference call at 4:30 p.m. Eastern time. Maybe Musk will address his philanthropic plan on Tuesday.