Michael and Susan Dell announced on Tuesday that they would deposit $250 in individual investment accounts for 25 million children, an amount totaling $6.25 billion. It is one of the largest philanthropic gifts ever to go directly to Americans.
The money expands the number of children who will receive seed money for the investment accounts, known as “Trump accounts.” The federal government will give $1,000 to babies born between Jan. 1, 2025, and Dec. 31, 2028. The Dells’ gift extends to children up to 10 years old, though it limits eligibility to those who live in a ZIP code where the median household income is below $150,000.
The federal government is expected to set up the accounts next summer, but many details of how they will work are still to be determined. There is no system in place yet for registering, and it is unclear where the accounts will reside.
Mr. Dell, the chairman and chief executive of Dell Technologies, first made his fortune by selling personal computers directly to consumers rather than through retail outlets. He sees this gift in a similar light.
“When I started a company 41 years ago, we created the direct model,” Mr. Dell said. “This is sort of the direct model philanthropy.”
The Dells hope that other philanthropists, corporations, and state and local governments will follow their example, pumping billions more into the accounts. The approach could become a model for wealthy donors who want to give away money but have not set up foundations and don’t know where to begin vetting recipient groups.
The idea for what became the Trump accounts started with a dining-room table conversation among Brad Gerstner, the chief executive of Altimeter Capital, and his children in 2021. Mr. Gerstner set up a nonprofit, Invest America, to push for the creation of accounts in which the federal government would give $1,000 to each child when born. He called Mr. Dell, a friend, shortly thereafter. The Dells were enthusiastic about the idea.
Mr. Gerstner reached out to the Biden administration and both Democrats and Republicans on Capitol Hill to build support, but the initiative did not gain traction until Mr. Dell spoke to President Trump this year. Senator Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas, introduced a bill to create the Invest America accounts. The name was changed to Trump accounts in the final version of the tax bill passed this year.
Mr. Dell and Mr. Gerstner emphasized that the idea for child savings accounts had bipartisan support. “If you look at what we’re doing, I don’t think this is in any way a partisan activity,” Mr. Dell said. “It’s certainly not intended to be.”
But if the program becomes a success, it will burnish an effort that bears Mr. Trump’s name.
“We’ve always made our focus to getting the support as close to families as possible, and Invest America continues that work,” Ms. Dell said in an interview. “This is a slightly different way of doing this, but the opportunity now is to do something really major and really touch 25 million children that will really benefit from this in a huge way.”
If money is left over after the initial sign-ups, the Dells said, they may extend it to children older than 10.
As philanthropists, the Dells have largely flown under the radar compared with names like Bill Gates, Melinda French Gates and MacKenzie Scott. But according to Ms. Dell, the couple has given $3 billion over the past 26 years, mostly to children’s causes. Tuesday’s commitment would vault them into the ranks of the nation’s top givers.
There have been a handful of larger gifts by philanthropists, like Mr. Gates’s $20 billion donation to his foundation in 2022. But those billions filter out from the foundations over many years or even decades through grants to nonprofits.
Similarly, Warren E. Buffett has donated billions of dollars in Berkshire Hathaway stock annually since 2006 to the Gates Foundation and foundations run by his children, also to be distributed over time to nonprofits.
In August, the Nike co-founder Phil Knight and his wife, Penny, announced a $2 billion gift to the cancer research center at Oregon Health & Science University, said to be the single largest donation to a university in the United States. In 2024, Ruth Gottesman, the 93-year-old widow of a Wall Street financier, announced a $1 billion donation to the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx, where she had been a professor.
Mr. Dell said they were “still working through the details” of how the money would get to individual children. The Treasury Department will facilitate the process of finding accounts that meet the couple’s criteria.
“And then we will transfer the funds,” he added, “and the Treasury Department will immediately transfer those funds into the accounts of those children.”
Employers can contribute up to $2,500 a year to the accounts of their employees’ children without its counting as taxable income. A number of major companies, including Dell Technologies, announced that they would match the $1,000 government contributions to their employees’ newborn children. By law, those accounts have to be invested in low-cost index funds at least until the children reach 18.
Mr. Dell said he had spoken to other philanthropists interested in joining the effort.
“We believe that if every child can see a future worth saving for,” he said, “we will have built something far greater than an account.”
Sophia June contributed reporting.
Nicholas Kulish is an enterprise correspondent for The Times writing about philanthropy, wealth and nonprofits. Before that, he served as the Berlin bureau chief and an East Africa correspondent based in Nairobi, Kenya. He joined The Times as a member of the editorial board in 2005.
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