One of the great joys, but also miseries, of following business news over the past decade or so has been riding the dodgy roller coaster of the Elon Musk experience. He has gone from a guy people considered a real-life Tony Stark to something more like a modern-day Henry Ford, in the worst possible way, with countless gut-wrenching twists in between.

At no point, however, did anybody think: “Hey, you know who’s missing out on this? Children.”Until today.

SpaceX Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk pledged on Monday to donate one share of his company to each of America’s 72 million children, vowing it would be the first such gift “of many.”If you had just this morning traveled here from another planet, then you might consider this a reasonably generous gesture from a near-trillionaire. The stock has been a bit stagnant since its June IPO, sure, but the company has billions of dollars in US government contracts, and Musk has promised its revenue will soar from less than $19 billion last year to $1 trillion by 2030.

Such a gift would barely trouble Musk’s vast wealth and power. It would cost about $10.5 billion, shaving Musk’s net worth to $889.5 billion. And as my Bloomberg Opinion colleague Liam Denning points out, it would cut his SpaceX voting power, currently at 82% because of the stock’s dual-class nature, by just 0.1 percentage points.

But even a passing familiarity with Musk’s whole vibe should raise many immediate concerns about this “promise.”For one thing, it was made on his social media app, X, formerly known as Twitter, on which Musk has promised many things, a large percentage of which have never happened. Most famous was his 2018 declaration that he had “funding secured” to take Tesla Inc. private at $420 a share. It got him in serious legal trouble when it turned out not to be true.

If you have several hours to kill, you can peruse this website for a long list of other unfulfilled Musk promises, including a “cross country summon” feature that would let your Tesla travel the continent by itself, style, to find you; half-hour rocket trips from New York to London; 1 million robotaxis; and seafaring Teslas, to name a few. Buying stock in Musk is less an investment than it is subscribing to a streaming service for increasingly ridiculous science fiction.

Also, it doesn’t seem as if Musk spent long hours conferring with lawyers and accountants planning for this gift. Rather, the timing and Musk’s track record suggest he saw SpaceX’s AI rival, Anthropic PBC, making its own charitable pledge on Sunday and felt the urge to one-up it. The maker of Claude vowed to donate 5% of its shares, potentially worth $75 billion (if the company is worth $1.5 trillion), to a fund that will benefit the “public good,” including AI’s destruction of jobs that kids want.

Musk replied to Anthropic’s X post making this announcement with a curt “I recommend giving the shares directly to the public,” suggesting he’s just better at doing charity. His detail-free promise of one share per child followed hours later. How will children receive these shares? Nobody knows, and the odds are very good that nobody will ever have to find out.

Anthropic’s offer seems to be an olive branch to AI’s large and growing contingent of haters and skeptics, including most of the American public, ahead of its IPO. Maybe it will also deflect some of the pressure to impose actual government regulation of the technology.

Musk could use some good publicity, too, and not just because SpaceX is a growing AI giant. He has embraced White nationalism and let SpaceX’s Starlink service undermine Ukraine’s effort to defend itself from Russia’s invasion. He manned the Department of Government Efficiency that slashed government jobs and offices without care for the repercussions, including the 700,000 people who have already died because of DOGE’s assault on USAID.

His behavior affects everyone invested in his companies, for better or worse, including those theoretical 72 million children. For a long time, “worse” has been a no-show; his fans have helped Tesla’s stock price defy traditional market logic for years. How long can the magic last? As tough as children have it these days, with the climate in chaos, war in Europe and the Middle East and AI threatening to take all of the jobs, do they really need the headache of finding out?