The world’s richest people have discovered a new way to give their money away: a couple hundred bucks to one kid at a time.

Elon Musk this week pledged to give millions of American children their own individual shares of his SpaceX company. That $150 or so would join donations from Michael and Susan Dell, Ray Dalio and other billionaires seeding kids’ investment accounts through a Trump Accounts program gaining steam as a new form of philanthropy.

“In many ways, this is our IPO moment, where Google was in 2005,” said tech investor Brad Gerstner, who conceived of the program six years ago, sold it to the White House and has overseen its rollout, in an interview.

Gerstner didn’t come up with the program to keep the pitchforks out of Menlo Park, but the giveaways debut at a time when tech billionaires need all the reputational help they can get.

From the movie theater to the debate stage, Silicon Valley titans have been cast as societal villains—eager to build technology that makes them rich and puts everyone else out of work. Communities across the country are opposing the data centers powering the AI boom, and a May YouGov poll found 62% of respondents said they wanted billionaires to have less political, economic and cultural power—the highest share for any group, ahead of Hollywood executives and CEOs.

Gerstner sees the Trump Accounts program as a new social contract between the wealthiest citizens and the rest of society, comparing it to the Social Security program that provided a safety net for unemployed or older Americans in the 1930s.

“Social Security is great for the end of life, but what about all of the folks who feel left out during their lives?” he said.

In images from France, where thousands of angry citizens have vandalized stores and taken to the streets, Gerstner sees a future to avoid.

“We’re watching France burn because people feel left out and left behind,” he said.

“The antidote to that is to make everybody an owner,” he added on Thursday morning, after visiting a school in the Bronx where he and a friend had donated $250 into the accounts of 3,000 students.

For critics of the Trump Accounts, the giveaways raise fresh concerns. Promising free shares through government accounts named after the president just before the midterm elections has political ramifications: Trump can tout the gifts to voters, and billionaires can curry favor with the White House. On Election Day, voters in California might institute a billionaire tax that has already driven some of the state’s wealthiest residents out of the state.

“The creation of this and the timing of this is completely political,” said Olivier Zunz, a historian and author of the book “Philanthropy in America.”A White House spokesman said nearly 70 million Trump Accounts have been created. “With Trump Accounts, President Trump has secured a signature economic achievement designed to help every American child,” he said.

Trump Accounts allow anyone—billionaire or not—to deposit money into an IRA established for anyone under the age of 18. Babies born between 2025 and 2028 will receive an automatic $1,000 deposit, and account holders won’t be able to access the money until they turn 18.

The goal: easy giving and compound interest combine to ensure all young adults have a nest egg they can use to pay for school, make a down payment for a home or keep investing in the U.S. economy. The $1,000 deposit could be worth more than $5,800 in 18 years, or around $3,400 in today’s dollars, based on the average U.S. stock market return and inflation rate over the past 100 years.

Gerstner, whose day job is running investment firm Altimeter Capital, pitches the program with the vernacular of a venture capitalist: “charitable giving at scale, directly to American kids, with proven ROI.”His model bypasses traditional philanthropy routing through organizations and causes.

“There’s cynicism about nonprofits and philanthropy, and there’s this desire among the megawealthy to bypass that avenue,” said Phil Buchanan, president of the Center for Effective Philanthropy, which studies giving, and host of the podcast “Giving Done Right.”Many nonprofits that Buchanan works with are struggling to survive after federal funding cuts, some of which were instituted by Musk’s DOGE program earlier in the Trump administration.

“Giving stock to kids? I mean, it’s certainly not a bad thing, if it actually happens. But is it the best thing that he could be doing right now?” he said.

Beyond his comments on social media, Musk has not said when or how he plans to distribute the SpaceX shares. A representative from Musk’s foundation didn’t respond to requests for comment.

This isn’t the first time industrialists have turned to handouts. One year before the nation would collapse in the Great Depression, the world’s first billionaire gave out dimes to schoolchildren.

Industrialist John D. Rockefeller was famous for his distribution of the coins, carrying them in his pocket everywhere he went.

Dimes bought more than candy: In the years after labor fights at his Standard Oil Company left workers dead, Rockefeller’s small gifts burnished a new reputation as a grandfatherly patron.

“When I give a dime to a child…I can tell him that the only way to get rich is to save, and that I would like to see every one rich,” he said in 1928.

Since Rockefeller’s time, the question of how to give away money has arrived at many answers: Endowed libraries and universities. Dying broke with the Giving Pledge. Microloans to the world’s poorest. Effective altruism. Family offices.

With the Trump Accounts, tech billionaires are handing out cash or shares to millions—and they’re doing it through the government. “It’s completely unprecedented,” said Zunz.

The Dell donation delivers $250 to 25 million accounts, focusing on children under the age of 10 in lower-income zip codes. The couple landed on the $250 figure to mark the nation’s semiquincentennial.

Since making the donation, the Dells have received cards and letters from children. Michael Dell said he’s heard of parents including a QR code linking to their child’s Trump Account on birthday party invitations.

“Instead of some socks or a sweater or some toy they use for a day, give them $25,” he said.

Gerstner said he doesn’t think the accounts should replace traditional giving, but are something to consider “instead of leaving all their money to their kids, or giving another $100 million to another university.”Growing up poor in rural Indiana, Gerstner competed in a high-school program of problem-solving competitions.

He and other brainy classmates would be assigned an issue—like global warming—and compete to present the best possible solution, with only a dictionary and a thesaurus as their available tools. His team at Wawasee High School was often among the top-ranked in the state.

He hatched the Invest America solution in the fall of 2020, when the nation was still under Covid-19 lockdowns. Economic anxiety was high—but so was the stock market, which was reaching records even with much of the nation shut down and people out of work.

Gerstner began to envision a program that would automatically enroll American children in an investment vehicle that let them take advantage of the stock market growth. In 2023, he recruited Dell and other CEOs to commit to giving to the children of their employees if it were passed into law.

For Dell, the concept took him back to his childhood in 1970s Houston, where his mother was a stockbroker and where he received a passbook savings account at age 8.

“It sounded to me like it would be very difficult to get done from a legislation point of view,” said Dell. “Because good ideas often don’t become legislation.”Gerstner initially pitched Biden administration officials on the plan, but said it never gained traction. (A spokesman for President Biden didn’t respond to a request for comment.) He tried again with Trump in his second term, and said the president pounced on the idea.

Since then, Trump Accounts have attracted a strange-bedfellows collection of supporters, including California’s Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom, Sen. Dave McCormick (R-Pa.) and Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.), who has proposed “baby bonds” legislation that carries echoes of the program.

In Brunswick, Ga., Heather LaVine recently put $25 each into Trump accounts for her two sons, aged 7 and 9. Within days, she got push notifications on her phone that the accounts had received $250 gifts from the Dells. She now plans to ask relatives to put money into the accounts instead of just giving her sons cash. She also supports Musk’s planned donations. “Free stock is never a bad thing,” she said.

But while the gifts have given her a positive impression of the Dells, they have done little to change her view of the president. She is upset about the rising cost of living and the state of the economy.

“I voted for Trump,” she said. “I don’t know that I’d give him my vote again.”The idea of taking some of the wealth of tech billionaires and redistributing it broadly to Americans has wide support—especially as the delta between the nation’s richest resident and its poorest widens. A surging stock market has led to wealth held by the top 0.1% of Americans more than doubling since 2019, according to the Federal Reserve.

America’s 50 biggest philanthropists donated $22.4 billion to charity in 2025, according to a report from the Chronicle of Philanthropy. That’s up almost 60% from 2000, adjusted for inflation. Tech moguls accounted for almost half of last year’s total.

Households worth $500 million or more in assets have an annual giving rate of 1.2% of assets, according to a July study published by the Bridgespan Group. That rate has held steady even as the number of ultrawealthy people has gone up.

Nine of the 10 wealthiest Americans now come from the tech industry. Views of the industry have soured amid anxiety over data centers, artificial intelligence and the harms of social media. In a recent Gallup poll, just 48% respondents felt positively about the industry, down from 75% in 2017.

For SpaceX, a share giveaway would create a stable base of investors in the stock who can’t sell for a long time. It generates public goodwill when Democrats are gearing up to investigate the company’s government contracts. For the ultrarich, giving away wealth in the form of shares is tax advantageous.

Billionaires can deduct charitable donations from their taxable income, and the potential savings are even bigger with donated shares. Musk’s SpaceX stock has exploded in value since he founded the company. If he sold it, he would face a massive capital-gains tax bill. If he donates shares, he avoids that bill. And at the same time, he can still deduct the full current value of any donated shares from any taxable income, according to Ray Madoff, a professor at Boston College Law School and author of “The Second Estate,” a book on the American tax code.

“That’s a pretty good deal for him to have bought massive amounts of goodwill from society,” she said.

Meanwhile, all recipients of charitable giving are preparing for another explosion of tech wealth in the coming months—through the expected IPOs of Anthropic and OpenAI.

This past week, Anthropic announced its own wealth-distribution plan in the form of what it called a “public benefit fund” that it will finance with 5% of the company’s shares.

The fund, company leaders said, will go toward people affected by labor market shifts brought on by AI.