Elon Musk's stock grants and Anthropic's public fund are band-aids on an open sore and do not address AI's most fundamental and pressing problems

Money for... something

Opinion By Lance Ulanoff Published 20 October 2026

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AI development and expansion is rocketing across our society, sparkling and bright like a Roman candle, but with its tail on fire. The disruptions are coming so fast, and the concerns are rising so quickly, that no one, not even those running the biggest AI companies, knows what to do. Instead of addressing issues like AI slop, job loss, self-replicating and developing AI running amok, and data centers, these AI bosses have come up with a better solution: cold, hard cash.

On Monday, Elon Musk casually posted on his X platform that he would give one of his SpaceX shares to every child in America, with the promise of more to come. Over at Anthropic, Dario Amodei proposed a public fund built on the value of 5% of his company's shares when it goes public next month.

Of the two offers, Anthropic has the most obvious value. The company might be worth a trillion dollars when it goes public in November, which means the fund will be close to $50 billion. That's a lot of money.

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Whether it's $150 (the approximate value of a SpaceX share) or $5 billion, neither offer actually addresses AI's myriad issues. None of this equals regulation, oversight, a pause, or a concrete global discussion about a technology that may in 12 months' time be able to do any of our jobs, access most of our systems, and start making decisions on our behalf. None address the real-time, growing cybersecurity threats posed by AI that can crack any encryption and set off Denial of Service attacks at unimaginable scales.

But how?

Let’s leave aside all that for a moment and talk about the nuts and bolts of these proposals.

First of all, there’s the question of how Elon Musk is going to give every one of the 72 million children in America a stock grant (assuming — a big assumption — he follows through). There are ways of doing this (custodial accounts, transfer to a brokerage, even platforms like GiveaShare that support stock gifts for children). Trump Account recently did something similar (sort of tiny Individual Retirement Accounts for pint-sized people). However, when those stocks go in there, they're not something the children will access now or in the near future.

What would be the value of $150? A couple of toys, a few outfits? More likely, what’s going to happen here is those SpaceX shares will sit and maybe accumulate value (maybe not), and then, when the child is an adult looking for one of the few jobs AI has not taken over, they’ll use it to help support themselves for a little while. Maybe buy a meal.

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