The news that global billionaire Musk is giving away money is spreading quite fast. Yesterday, he posted a short message on X: next year, he will give a share of his SpaceX stock to every child in America.
Based on the closing price of $147.96 on October 19, with about 70 million children in the U.S., one share per child amounts to just over ten billion dollars.
Technically, this is simpler than it sounds. The U.S. already has a securities account that covers everyone, attached to each child's identification number, created in 2025, called the Trump Account.
The government gives each newborn a seed fund of $1,000, which is invested in index funds and cannot be accessed freely until they are 18. As of 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 billionaire giving away money is just a facade. Musk has his own logic; Silicon Valley in America is trying to accomplish something.
That word is UBI, Universal Basic Income.
A regular cash payment, unconditionally, given to individuals.
Before Musk, his two major AI rivals had done the same thing at different times.
2023, An Iron Ball
An iron mirror sphere about twenty centimeters in diameter is mounted on a metal stand, placed at the entrance of a mobile phone store in Nairobi.
Walk up, press your eye against it. The sphere rotates, your iris is captured in a video, compressed, and uploaded. A few seconds later, a line appears on the screen: verification complete. Your wallet gains 25 WLD.
WLD is an on-chain cryptocurrency that can be exchanged for cash.
This is the entire interface of the "Universal Basic Income" experiment of 2023. No applications, no social workers, no hearings. Just a ball, an eye, a string of numbers.
The company doing this is called World. The founder is Sam Altman, the same Sam Altman who is involved with OpenAI.
World's purpose is simple. Sam himself is somewhat scared of OpenAI, thinking that AI will increasingly resemble humans, and what he wants to do is make people prove they are human. Then he will give them money.
The logic is not incorrect. World has spent years acquiring funding, deploying the iron ball in dozens of countries, and building a "unique verification system" of "the only you in the world" — iris recognition, zero-knowledge proofs, a string of hashes.
This endeavor has faced much skepticism; for example, some believe it is using money to buy privacy, and some countries have already banned Sam Altman from setting up the iron ball to capture irises locally. Moreover, WLD has been declining continuously, completely failing to reach UBI, and living off the WLD received monthly is not sustainable.
Interestingly, three years later, that iron ball is still turning, and the experiment has not ceased.
A Self-Growing Pool
On October 18, 2026, just a few days ago, Anthropic posted an announcement on its official website titled "Investing in the Public Benefit."
The company set aside 5% of its shares, placing them into a newly established entity called the Anthropic Public Benefit Fund. Subsequently, if the company's valuation surpasses a preset baseline, the board can add another 2% for every 50% growth.
This fund is not a charity foundation. It is a limited liability company wholly owned by Anthropic that can "make large donations to traditional non-profit organizations" or "directly allocate to specific groups."
Anthropic calculated that, including the promise of founders to donate 80% of their shares at startup, along with an employee matching donation program (about half the employees participated), a total of roughly 20% of shares will be used for public benefit.
What does 20% amount to? The outside world estimates Anthropic's post-IPO valuation to be between $1.5 trillion and $2 trillion. At the lower end, 20% equals $300 billion: divided among 340 million Americans, that's $880 per person.
Clearly, the three top large model companies, which have been quarrelling with each other, have been trying to do roughly the same thing over these three years—giving away money—though in different ways.
This is certainly not a coincidence.
The Same Answer
In fact, Musk was the earliest. In February 2017, at the World Government Summit in Dubai, he said on stage: robots and AI taking away jobs would present “a huge social challenge,” and “eventually, we will have to have some form of universal basic income. I don’t think we will have a choice.”
That was nine years ago, when GPT did not yet exist.
Altman articulated the logic in a paper in 2021. He stated that once AI enters the labor market, prices for multiple labor types will drop and approach zero; more power will shift from labor to capital; and if public policy does not adjust accordingly, most people will live worse than today. Thus, he advocates “taxing capital, not labor,” and redistributing the collected funds directly to citizens — “the best way to improve capitalism is to allow everyone to benefit directly as owners.”
Dario Amodei, the founder of Anthropic, who often talks about AI potentially competing with humanity, stated that if AI realizes even a small part of its potential, it could very well become a “universal substitute for labor,” and these gains will accompany a decline in the demand for human labor, making it “difficult or impossible for many workers to adapt.” He later mentioned that in five years, half of entry-level white-collar jobs will be replaced.
Three people, three points in time, one common conclusion: this technological revolution is replacing labor itself.
They then began to ponder if humans won’t be working, how will they survive.
In 2024, Musk, at VivaTech in Paris, provided his accepted conclusion: "In a positive scenario, we might all not have jobs. It would be universal high income, not basic income, but high income. There won't be a shortage of goods and services." He assigned an 80% probability to this scenario.
Altman and Amodei clearly also share Musk's views, so they are considering how money should flow to people.
Altman discusses distribution. He says that people will spend more time with loved ones, caring for others, appreciating art and nature, or engaging in public service; but what he is obviously more concerned with is how the money is distributed. His plan specifies tax rates: a tax equivalent to 2.5% of the corporate value paid in stock each year; a 2.5% tax on private land value paid in cash; and dividends for citizens over 18 per capita. He has calculated: in ten years, approximately $13,500 per year for each of the 250 million adults in the U.S.
Amodei discusses stratification, similar to a tiered emergency plan: when the unemployment rate is 5%, enhance the current "pre-distribution capital account"; when the unemployment rate hits 10%, expand unemployment insurance and wage insurance, providing tax incentives for companies that do not lay off workers; only when unemployment reaches unprecedented levels do the focus and strategy shift from "temporary transitional measures" to "long-term income distribution for a large portion of people," requiring "new sources of taxation," which may include basic income, sovereign wealth models, and equity sharing mechanisms.
The very entities causing human unemployment have now reframed themselves as humanity's saviors.
The method is simply to distribute money.
Anthropic has staked 20% of its shares, which amounts to $300 billion at a valuation of $1.5 trillion.
Musk’s stake is in stocks, which, at today’s price, amounts to just over ten billion dollars.
Altman has already been distributing money for three years.
It Doesn’t Generate a Dime
Have cash payments actually been useful? Humanity has been testing this for fifty years.
In 2017, Finland conducted an experiment with 2,000 unemployed individuals, each receiving €560 per month for two years. They were indeed happier, but there was no actual improvement in employment.
In 2019, Stockton, California, offered 125 residents $500 per month. The money was spent on food, rent, and car repairs; they still kept their jobs.
From November 2020 to October 2023, in Texas and Illinois, 3,000 people participated. 1,000 individuals received $1,000 a month, while 2,000 received $50 a month. Those receiving money worked an average of 1.3 hours less per week, totaling eight fewer workdays in a year; however, the number of active job seekers increased by 10%; they spent $310 more per month, with $67 on food, $52 on rent, and $50 on transportation. But paradoxically, after three years and $36,000, their physical health did not improve at all.
The real issue lies with the money. If every person receives $1,000 per month in the U.S., with 260 million adults, that amounts to $3.1 trillion a year. The total annual revenue of the U.S. federal government is about $5.2 trillion. A basic income that "doesn’t allow for a decent living in any state" would consume sixty percent of federal finances.
And corporate income tax generates only around $500 billion a year. If all corporate income tax were confiscated from U.S. companies, it would only cover one-sixth of this expense.
Even if taxes were increased later to accommodate the budget, there remains a second hurdle: cash flow.
There has only been one model that has truly worked globally. In 1976, Alaska established a permanent fund using oil revenues. In 1982, the first checks were mailed to residents. Since then, checks have been sent every year for over forty years. One year, it amounted to over two thousand dollars per person, while another year had only a few hundred. The amounts fluctuate with oil prices and investment returns, but those checks have never stopped coming.
This works because they distribute money from the earnings, with new oil dollars flowing in every year. It's not a “one-time payout” fund; it’s a machine that has “continuous inflow” every year.
Whether shares from AI companies can compare to oil is still uncertain.
The current iteration of AI, the three companies that can truly afford it, are indeed beginning to resemble entities capable of extracting oil.
Eighteen Years Old
That iron ball continues to turn at the entrance of the store in Nairobi.
A child born in Ohio in 2026, when they turn 18 and open an account, will find an index fund, a bit of government seed money, and perhaps a share of SPCX. By then, what will SpaceX’s valuation be? Will xAI still exist? At what round is the Anthropic pool now? One cannot tell.
The only thing certain is: this might be the first generation in history to “be born holding shares of an AI company.”
In 18 years, this first generation, on an afternoon without work, exchanging a bit of SPCX for an Americano, what might they be thinking?
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