Share for every child: Anthropic and Musk make billion promises

Anthropic and Elon Musk act as benefactors. The company specialized in artificial intelligence and the richest person in the world have now announced that they will make larger stock packages available for the common good. Anthropic wants to set up a new non-profit subsidiary, to which five percent of its shares are initially to be sold. Musk announced plans to give every child in the US a share of his space company SpaceX next year. Both promises could reach billions. Anthropic is preparing its IPO and is targeting a $2 trillion valuation, according to media reports. A share of five percent would be worth 100 billion dollars. Musk did not specify up to what age children would qualify for his donation. According to government figures, there are about 73 million children under the age of 18. If each of them got a share of SpaceX, that package would be worth more than $10 billion at the company’s current share price. Fund to create flexibility The promises come at a time when there is increasing talk about the dangers of AI technologies. So Anthropic and Musk can hope to put themselves in a positive light in the midst of these discussions. Musk also sets a counterpole to an unflattering documentary about him, which has just come to American cinemas. Anthropic is already registered today as a “Public Benefit Corporation”, a company that pursues profit intentions, but also gives itself another mission in its statutes, which should create social benefits. In a blog post of the company, it is now said that the establishment of its own charitable fund allows “additional flexibility and size”. The shares in the fund could be used, among other things, for donations to traditional charities or to certain population groups. For example, they could be used to mitigate any negative impact of AI technologies on the labour market. Anthropic has already announced a research program this year to investigate AI effects on jobs. For this, 200 million dollars were pledged. In the blog post, Anthropic wrote that given the speed of AI progress, “bolder approaches” might be needed to address this issue, and the new fund could help. The first of many donations? Anthropic wants to overwrite the fund immediately five percent of its shares, and this share could increase in the future even further. For each increase in the valuation of the company of 50 percent above a certain base amount, a further two percent of the shares should go to the fund. Anthropic pointed out that with this announcement, a total of 20 percent of all shares are now earmarked for the “common good”. Even when the company was founded, the co-founders undertook to donate 80 percent of their shares. In addition, there is a program at Anthropic, according to which employees can donate shares and the company then do this in the same number. Elon Musk spoke out on his platform X following Anthropic’s announcement and commented on it with the recommendation to give shares “directly to the public”. This is exactly what he promised a little later with his promise to give SpaceX shares to all American children. He said this would only be the first of many donations. Should Musk fulfill his promise, that would be remarkable, because in the past he has noticed little about charity compared to some other multibillionaires like Bill Gates. Musk is by far the richest person in the world. The Bloomberg Billionaires Index currently puts his assets at more than $900 billion. A few months ago, Gwynne Shotwell, president of SpaceX, announced plans to donate one of her shares to more than two million children in the US. These shares are to be put into the so-called “Trump Accounts”, the recently introduced by the US government tax-advantaged and government-subsidized children’s securities depository. How Musk wants to distribute his shares, he has not said so far.