The news of the world's richest man Musk giving away money spread quite quickly. Yesterday, he posted a short message on X: Next year, he will give one share of his SpaceX stock to every child in the United States.
Based on the closing price of $147.96 on October 19, with approximately 70 million children in the U.S., one share each amounts to just over $10 billion.
Technically, this is simpler than it sounds. The United States already has a securities account covering everyone, linked to each child's ID number, launched in 2025, called the Trump Account.
The government gives each newborn a $1,000 seed deposit, invested in index funds, which cannot be freely accessed 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 to 70 million children.
The richest man giving away money is just the surface. Musk has his own separate logic, and Silicon Valley in the U.S. is trying to accomplish one thing.
That word is UBI, universal basic income.
A regularly distributed cash payment, unconditional, given to individuals.
Before Musk, his two major AI rivals did the same thing, just at different times.
2023, an iron ball
A mirror ball about 20 centimeters in diameter, mounted on an iron frame, placed at the entrance of a mobile phone store in Nairobi.
Walk up and press your eye against it. The sphere rotates once, the iris is captured as a video, compressed, and uploaded. 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 converted to cash.
This was the entire interface of that 2023 "universal basic income" experiment. No application forms, no social workers, no hearings. One ball, 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. What he wants to do is let people prove they are human. And then give you money.
The logic isn't wrong. World burned through cash for years, spreading its orb across dozens of countries and building a verification system for "the only one of you in the whole world"—iris scans, zero-knowledge proofs, a string of hashes.
There's plenty of skepticism. Some argue it's buying privacy with money, and some countries have already banned Sam Altman from setting up his orb locally to scan irises. On top of that, WLD keeps falling and falls far short of UBI—living month to month on distributed WLD won't last two days.
What's interesting is that three years on, the 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 website titled "Investing in the public benefit."
The company set aside 5% of its shares into a newly created 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 nonprofits" or "distribute directly to specific populations."
Anthropic did the math: adding the 80% of their respective holdings that the founders pledged to donate at startup, plus the employee matching program (about half of employees participate), roughly 20% of shares in total will go toward the 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, been trying to do roughly the same thing—simply put, giving out money. Only the posture differs.
Of course, it's no coincidence.
The same answer
Actually, Musk was first. In February 2017, at the World Government Summit in Dubai, he sat on stage and said: robots and AI taking jobs would 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. Back then, GPT didn't exist.
Altman turned the logic into a paper in 2021. He said that once AI enters the labor market, the price of many types of labor will fall and approach zero; more power will shift from labor to capital; and if public policy doesn't adjust accordingly, most people will be worse off than they are today. So he advocated "taxing capital, not labor," and then distributing the proceeds directly to citizens—"The best way to improve capitalism is to make everyone a direct beneficiary as an owner."
Dario Amodei, the founder of Anthropic, the guy who constantly says AI will crush humanity, said that if AI fulfills even a small part of its potential, it is likely to become a "general substitute" for labor, and these gains will come with a decline in demand for human labor, "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 is replacing labor itself.
Then they started thinking: if people don't work, how will they live?
In 2024, Musk at VivaTech in Paris gave his endorsed conclusion: "In a benign scenario, we may all have no jobs. It will be universal high income, not basic income—high income. Goods and services will not be in short supply." He put an 80% probability on this scenario.
Altman and Amodei clearly agree with Musk's view, so the two of them are thinking: how does the money flow to people?
Altman talks about distribution. He says that in the future humans will spend more time with loved ones, caring for others, looking at art and nature, or doing public welfare; but what he cares about more is clearly how the money is distributed. His plan is specific down to the tax rate: impose an annual tax on enterprises equivalent to 2.5% of market value, paid in stock; impose 2.5% on private land value, paid in cash; and distribute dividends per capita to citizens over 18. He has done the math himself: ten years later, each of the 250 million adults in the United States will receive about $13,500 per year.
Amodei talks about tiers. It's like a graded emergency plan: when unemployment is 5%, expand the existing "front-loaded distribution capital accounts"; when unemployment is 10%, expand unemployment insurance, add wage insurance, and give tax incentives to companies that don't lay off workers; only when unemployment reaches unprecedented levels does the focus shift from "temporary transition" to "long-term income distribution to a large portion of the population," requiring "new sources of tax revenue," possibly including basic income, sovereign wealth models, and equity-sharing mechanisms.
These people who are putting humans out of work have switched to a new narrative, rebranding themselves as humanity's saviors.
The method is handing out money.
Anthropic has pledged a 20% stake, which at a $1.5 trillion valuation comes to $300 billion.
Musk is pledging stock, which at today's price is just over $10 billion.
Altman's side has already been handing out money for 3 years.
It doesn't generate a single cent
Whether handing out money actually works—humanity has been testing that for fifty years.
In 2017, Finland ran an experiment: 2,000 unemployed people, each receiving €560 per month for two years. They were indeed quite happy, but employment showed no improvement.
In 2019, Stockton, California: 125 residents, $500 per month. The money went to food, rent, and car repairs, and people kept working.
From November 2020 to October 2023, in Texas and Illinois: 3,000 people. 1,000 received $1,000 per month, and 2,000 received $50 per month. Those receiving money worked on average 1.3 fewer hours per week—eight fewer days of work per year; but the number of people actively looking for work actually rose 10%; they spent $310 more per month—$67 on food, $52 on rent, $50 on transportation. But the most counterintuitive part: three years, $36,000, and it didn't improve their physical health one bit.
The real problem is the money. $1,000 per person per month, across 260 million American adults, comes to $3.1 trillion a year. The entire annual revenue of the U.S. federal government is about $5.2 trillion. A basic income that is "not enough to live decently in any state" would eat up 60% of federal finances.
And corporate income tax brings in only about $500 billion a year. Confiscate every cent of income tax paid by all American companies, and it would cover only one-sixth of that bill.
But even if taxes were raised later and the money was sufficient, there's a second hurdle: cash flow.
Only one model worldwide has truly worked. In 1976, Alaska used oil revenue to create a permanent fund. In 1982, the first check was mailed to residents' homes. Every year since then, checks have gone out—for more than forty years. One year each person got over $2,000; another year only a few hundred. The amount fluctuates with oil prices and investment returns, but that check has never stopped.
Because they hand out the returns, and new petrodollars flow in every year. It is not a "one-time payout" fund; it is a machine with "water flowing in every year."
Whether AI company shares can rival oil is still hard to say.
In this round of AI iteration, the three companies that can best afford it are indeed starting to look like they can drill for oil.
Eighteen Years Old
That iron ball is still spinning at the shop entrance in Nairobi.
A child born in Ohio in 2026, at age 18, opens an account and will see an index fund, a little seed money from the government, and perhaps a share of SPCX. What SpaceX's valuation will be then, whether xAI still exists, which round Anthropic's pool has reached — all unclear.
Only one thing is certain: this is probably the first generation in history to be "born holding shares in an AI company."
This first generation, 18 years later, on an afternoon off from work, exchanging a little SPCX for a cup of Americano — what will they be thinking?
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