Elon Musk Giving Out SpaceX Shares As ‘Universal Basic Income’ Becomes A Major Proposal To Tackle AI

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Billionaire Elon Musk suggested Monday he wants to give every child a share of SpaceX, his space company that also owns AI chatbot Grok, potentially marking a step toward what’s known as “universal basic capital,” a proposal that’s started to attract momentum from politicians on both sides of the aisle as a way to deal with the rise of AI.

Key Facts

Musk said on X early Monday he would “give one of my SpaceX shares to every kid in America” next year, promising those shares would be “the first of many”—a proposal that is in line with “universal basic capital,” or UBC.

UBC broadly refers to giving Americans investment accounts and seeding them with equity—potentially focusing on AI companies, though not necessarily—in order to help people build wealth and stem the potential impacts of AI taking jobs.

AI leaders have touted UBC and similar proposals recently as a way to combat criticism of AI and its impact, and politicians on both sides of the aisle have also backed it, with Democratic California Gov. Gavin Newsom signing an executive order in May that includes a directive for California to study implementing it and Republican Ohio gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy cheering the idea in a December op-ed for The New York Times.

Giving out stocks to Americans directly is one of two primary ways that governments and AI leaders have explored UBC, with the other being governments receiving equity in AI companies and using that equity to create a “sovereign wealth fund” to benefit its citizens, or AI companies establishing their own wealth funds directly.

The Trump administration has reportedly been in talks with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman about an arrangement that would give the U.S. equity in AI companies, and Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., introduced legislation that would create a wealth fund through a one-time 50% tax on AI companies, while Anthropic announced Sunday it will pledge at least 5% of its shares to a new “public benefit fund.”